A woman who visits her family without her husband’s permission can be sent to prison. A husband who beats his wife severely could get off with just a 15-day sentence, while a woman who leaves Islam could be jailed for life and flogged every three days.
These are among the punishments laid out in a new criminal code that has been officially adopted by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The document outlines the legal structure by which the Taliban have replaced Afghan law over the four and a half years since they seized power, laying bare a system that prioritises social control, patriarchy, and ideological enforcement over the protection of individual rights.
Women are disproportionately affected. Their movement, relationships, beliefs and family decisions are subject to legal scrutiny. Their protection from violence is limited, while their behaviour is heavily regulated.
Here are some of the key articles affecting women:
- One of the most striking provisions, article 34, regulates women’s mobility. It states that a woman can be imprisoned for three months just for staying at her birth family’s home without either her husband’s permission or what it calls a “Sharia-justified reason”. If her family does not return her following a judicial order, they too become criminals subject to the same punishment. It effectively treats married women as the legal dependents of their husbands, denying them the right to choose where they live or seek refuge during family disputes or domestic conflict.
- Article 32 states that if a husband beats his wife with “obscene force” — defined narrowly as causing fractures, wounds, or visible bruises — he may be sentenced to just 15 days of imprisonment, provided the wife can prove the abuse in court. The high evidentiary threshold and short prison term contrast sharply with other punishments in the Taliban legal system. Consensual physical contact between unrelated adults can carry one year in prison, while severe spousal violence results in barely two weeks of detention.
- The code also criminalises everyday social behaviour. Article 37 imposes a one-year prison sentence on a man for forming what it calls an “un-Islamic relationship” with a woman he’s not married or related to. This includes acts such as holding hands, hugging or kissing. Another article says that looking at female neighbours “inappropriately,” making gestures toward them, discussing their appearance, or asking about their private lives is punishable by one month of imprisonment.
- Article 58 states that an apostate woman — someone who leaves Islam — can be sentenced to life imprisonment. In addition, she is to receive 10 lashes every three days until she returns to the faith. In contrast, the Taliban penal code does not explicitly specify the punishment for male apostates. However, according to the Hanafi jurisprudential tradition that the Taliban follow, men are typically given up to three days to repent and return to Islam before facing capital punishment if they refuse to recant.
- Article 9 outlines a tiered punishment system based on social class, adopted from a seventeenth-century collection of religious verdicts gathered under the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. Based on this stratified punishment system, scholars and elites receive warnings, merchants are summoned and reprimanded and middle-class offenders face detention, while lower-class people face imprisonment and can be given up to 39 lashes. This system institutionalises inequality before the law. Poor and marginalised individuals — including many women who lack economic independence — are more likely to face physical punishment than verbal reprimands.
- Article 14 grants authorities the power to impose the death penalty in the name of “public interest.” This includes people accused of spreading corruption, defending beliefs deemed un-Islamic, practising sorcery, or repeatedly committing moral offences such as sodomy or theft. This article seems to affect women in cases of moral offences.
- Article 60 further allows execution for habitual same-sex acts, subject to approval by senior religious leadership. The vague language surrounding “corruption” and “false beliefs” gives Taliban authorities wide discretionary power to label dissent, religious difference, or social nonconformity as capital crimes.
- Article 55 enforces financial dependency through imprisonment for men who refuse to pay legally mandated maintenance [wives are often considered dependent on men according to most of Islamic jurisprudence], with incarceration used as leverage to compel compliance.
