This indictment has been submitted to the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) at the occasion of its 55° session held in Madrid (8-10 October 2025) and in response to the deliberate, systematic, and institutionalized campaign of gender-based persecution carried out by the Taliban de facto authorities against women and girls in Afghanistan since August 15, 2021.
Drawing upon survivor testimonies, corroborated documentation, and the findings of international bodies, the prosecutorial team submits that the Taliban’s policies of exclusion, repression, and erasure (grounded in misogyny and enforced through mechanisms of state-like control), constitute crimes against humanity under Article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute, particularly the crime of gender persecution.
The purpose of this indictment is threefold:
(1) to restore visibility and dignity to Afghan women and girls whose rights have been erased and whose voices have been forcibly silenced;
(2) to pursue accountability through peoples’ justice where formal remedies remain absent, slow, inaccessible, or ineffective;
and (3) to contribute to the development of jurisprudence on gender persecution and gender apartheid, addressing urgent legal and normative gaps in the global accountability framework.
The PPT’s panel of judges will issue its Preliminary statement on 10 October, according to the program available here.
For more information, visit: https://afghanistantribunal.com
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