Taliban Rule Deepens Afghanistan’s Human Rights Crisis: UNAMA

The latest UNAMA update on the human rights situation in Afghanistan, covering April to June 2026 and released on 28 July, reads less like an incremental progress report and more like a catalogue of a system tightening its grip. Four and a half years after seizing power, the Taliban have moved well past the early rhetoric of moderation.

What emerges instead is a governance model built on surveillance, coercion and fear, one that continues to target the most vulnerable while closing off any remaining space for dissent.

Media freedom has been among the first casualties. Radio stations remain shut, journalists face arrest, and outlets are routinely raided with equipment confiscated. That even government employees are now barred from using smartphones speaks to a broader anxiety within the regime itself, a fear that information, once it flows freely, becomes a threat to control.

This is not simply censorship. It is an attempt to sever Afghans from each other and from the outside world, one confiscated phone and one shuttered newsroom at a time.

Women and girls, as ever, bear the heaviest burden. Decree No. 18 adds fresh restrictions to marriage, divorce and separation, layering new constraints onto an already suffocating framework. The now-familiar tools of control persist: hijab enforcement, the mahram requirement, exclusion from universities, the ongoing ban on girls’ education.

But the report suggests the Taliban are not content to simply maintain these restrictions; they are expanding them. Women are now being barred from shops and hospitals if unaccompanied by a male guardian, subjected to stricter dress codes, and detained over vague and arbitrary judgments about “improper hijab.”

Access to basic services, in other words, is being conditioned on submission to male oversight, even in matters as essential as healthcare.

Morality policing, meanwhile, has become the connective tissue of Taliban rule. Hundreds have faced punishment for hijab violations, for beards deemed too short, for listening to music. At least 137 people were subjected to corporal punishment during this quarter alone, even as public announcements of such punishments have become less frequent.

That quieter approach should not be mistaken for restraint. It looks more like an effort to reduce international scrutiny while the underlying practice continues unchecked.

The report also documents a darker pattern of arbitrary arrests, torture, killings and reprisals against former government and security officials. Years after the republic’s collapse, these individuals remain targets, a reminder that the Taliban’s consolidation of power still depends on eliminating perceived threats from the old order. Fear, not law, functions as the primary mechanism of control.

Religious minorities face their own version of this squeeze. Ismaili places of worship in Badakhshan have been closed or converted into mosques, an act that goes beyond restriction into erasure of religious identity. Ashura commemorations, meanwhile, have been met with communication blackouts and arrests of Shia worshippers, signaling that even long-tolerated religious practices are no longer safe from interference.

Legally, the picture is equally bleak. The report points to a framework that effectively legitimizes child marriage and makes it nearly impossible for women to obtain a divorce, entrenching discrimination into the architecture of daily life rather than treating it as an unfortunate byproduct of policy.

Public flogging for breaking the Ramadan fast, still practiced in this quarter, underscores how corporal punishment remains a normalized instrument of governance rather than an exceptional measure.

Perhaps the most sobering detail is also the smallest in scale: a nine-year-old child killed during protests in Badakhshan. It is a stark illustration of how far the Taliban are willing to go to suppress dissent, and of how thin the line has become between political control and open violence against civilians.

Taken together, these findings do not describe a government struggling with growing pains. They describe a deliberate and expanding project of repression, one where civic space keeps shrinking, accountability remains absent, and ordinary Afghans, particularly women, minorities and dissenters, continue to pay the price.

The international community’s response to this report will say as much about global commitment to human rights as it does about Afghanistan itself.