The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported in its latest quarterly update (Q1 2026), which covers the period from April to June 2026, a grim and familiar picture. Five years into the Taliban’s return to power, the report reveals a growing intensification of these repressive policies, especially for women, religious minorities, journalists, and those viewed as a threat to the de facto order of the Taliban. Drawing on monitoring by UNAMA’s Human Rights Service, the update reads less like a single incident report and more like a running ledger of a system that keeps adding new rules faster than old ones can be challenged.
The most remarkable thing is the bureaucracy of the apparatus of control. This is no longer ad hoc enforcement carried out by individual officers on a given day. It has been codified in decrees, ministries have been created to support it, and it is increasingly resistant to outside pressure, despite a slew of statements from international bodies.
The Widening Net Around Women
The arrest of at least 30 women in Herat for alleged hijab violations was not an isolated incident, and it did not stay confined to Herat’s streets. It was corroborated by UN News, which reported that UN Women called itself “gravely concerned,” noting the women were accused of violating decrees requiring a burka or chador with a face mask, alongside a ban on wearing perfume. The atmosphere of fear is so strong in Herat, a city of some one million people near the Iranian border, that women have reportedly ceased getting out of their homes, according to eyewitness accounts collected by RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi. One resident said authorities had struck a woman with a rifle butt so hard that it drew blood and then prevented her from getting medical attention. Separate reporting from Afghanistan International put the number arrested in one district alone at over 20, including women who were arrested at a shopping center and in the Qasr area of the city, some of whom were said to be already fully covered.
This street-level enforcement is now backed by law in ways that go far beyond dress codes. The “Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses” (Decree No. 18), published by the de facto Ministry of Justice on 14 May 2026 and approved by Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, provides the grounds for the dissolution of marriage. In theory, it provides a legal avenue for the separation of women. In practice, however, UNAMA’s own words on the decree explain that it operates in a “dreadfully unequal structure”, with men having the unilateral ability to divorce, and women having to go through long and complicated legal proceedings if they want to follow suit. Georgette Gagnon, UNAMA’s Deputy Special Representative, called it part of “a broader and deeply concerning trajectory in which the rights of Afghan women and girls are being eroded.”
The most disturbing aspect of the decree is its treatment of child marriage. Amnesty International noted that the code sets no minimum marriage age and instead addresses how a marriage involving a girl who has reached puberty might later be annulled, effectively presuming the marriage is valid unless proven otherwise. One of the clauses in the decree, widely reported by NPR, says that when a girl reaches puberty, her silence is taken as consent for a marriage arranged for her. The decree reversed the previous Afghan legislation, which established a minimum age of marriage and made forced marriage and child marriage punishable under the law, according to UN Women’s own statement. Taken alongside Decree No. 18, Decree No. 12 from earlier in 2026, which allowed only narrow judicial intervention in cases of severe physical abuse and carried a mere 15-day sentence for convicted husbands, the picture is one of a legal system being rebuilt from the ground up to formalize male authority over marriage rather than to protect the women and girls inside it.
On top of these legislative amendments are the mahram regulations implemented by the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (PVPV) ministry, which made even something as simple as going to the shop and health clinic subject to the presence of a male guardian. The result, as the report frames it, is a system where women’s movement through public life is blocked procedurally at nearly every point, not merely discouraged in principle. That Afghan women have now been barred from UN premises for 296 consecutive days, and that not a single woman sat a university entrance exam this quarter, suggests these are not temporary or improvised measures. They are a settled and self-reinforcing policy.
Enforcement, Punishment, and a Narrowing Public Space
The PVPV has grown from dress code to permeate almost every aspect of one’s life. UNAMA’s count of 389 arbitrary arrests and 65 ill-treatment incidents tied to the ministry, for reasons ranging from trimmed beards to Western-style haircuts to playing music, points to a moral enforcement apparatus with an ever-widening definition of infraction. The new Law on Preachers, which places religious sermons under tighter PVPV oversight, extends that reach directly into the mosque, narrowing one of the few remaining spaces for independent religious speech.
Corporal punishment in court remained in effect, and at least 137 individuals, 112 men and 25 women, were flogged during the quarter. Notably, public announcements of these punishments declined even as the underlying practice continued, a shift that may reflect growing sensitivity to international scrutiny rather than any actual change in policy.
Elsewhere, the same pattern of closing space repeats itself. Media closures, detentions and searches of the offices of broadcasters kept independent reporting under pressure, and several outlets were suspended or had to change their operation completely. Ismaili religious institutions were closed or turned into mosques, and Ashura prayers were banned, with Shia worshippers being detained, as has been reported in previous reporting periods by human rights groups. Former government and security officials are also still at high risk: UNAMA reported that 8 former officials and 29 former ANDSF members were killed and 29 arrested in the quarter alone, which directly challenges the Taliban’s claims of safety for those who took the amnesty.
The most dramatic incident in the report is the killing of two civilians, including a nine-year-old boy, by the Taliban as they protested against the eradication of poppy cultivation in Badakhshan. It is a small, brutal example of the intersection of economic policy and repression in rural Afghanistan, and the collision of livelihoods and enforcement with fatal consequences.
Finally, the report’s documentation of 399 civilian casualties from cross-border violence, 57 killed and 342 injured, which UNAMA attributes to Pakistani security forces, signals that Afghan civilians are now absorbing harm from two directions at once: internal enforcement by their own de facto authorities, and external conflict along the border. Taken together, this update reinforces what UNAMA has now documented across consecutive quarterly reports. The human rights situation in Afghanistan is not improving. It is narrowing, one decree, one arrest campaign, and one closed door at a time.
