United Nations Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett recently noted to the U.N.’s annual Commission on the Status of Women meeting in New York that Afghanistan today has no women working as lawyers, including as judges or prosecutors.
This was not the Afghanistan I knew five years ago. I should know, I was its attorney general.
When I took office in 2016, the prosecution system I inherited employed 6,000 people. Fewer than 3 percent were women. By the time the United States withdrew in 2021, that figure had reached 23 percent. Through U.S.-funded rule-of-law programs via the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), we trained 250 female prosecutors and integrated them into every level of the justice system — from Kabul to provincial offices that had never seen a woman behind a prosecutor’s desk.
As these professional women entered the system, something measurable happened. The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) documented a significant increase in the number of cases registered by police, prosecutors, and courts across multiple provinces alleging violence against women. Women were coming forward to report crimes they had always experienced but never reported. UNAMA attributed the increase directly to Afghan women’s growing demands for justice — they were not coming forward because violence had increased but because, for the first time, they believed the system might listen. Post-Taliban Afghanistan at the time already had established laws and policies focused on protection and justice for women and children, including specialized legal frameworks, family police units, specifically assigned prosecutors and special courts. But the element that had been lacking for female victims was just one thing: someone in the room who shared their experience. When women prosecutors were present, women came forward. The connection was that direct.
Constructing a New Legal System
Afghanistan’s legal system was reconstructed after the post-9/11 U.S. invasion in 2001 that toppled the Taliban, which had been harboring al-Qaeda. With international support, the country developed a new written constitution, an independent three-tier court structure, an independent Attorney General’s Office, and an independent bar association. Prosecutors built cases. Judges decided them. The defense lawyers provided legal defense and legal consultations. These were separate functions — a structural guarantee that no single person could both accuse and convict. Evidence was required. Decisions could be appealed. Courts kept written records.
This system took 20 years to construct. It took 11 days to lose.
On Aug. 15, 2021, I watched Kabul fall, feeling numb. Within days, the Taliban released thousands of prisoners — abusers of women, drug traffickers, murderers, members of armed groups, all of whom had been convicted by the system we built. Many of those men knew exactly who had put them there.
Within weeks, the targeted killings began. The Afghan Prosecutors Association, now in exile, has documented at least 57 prosecutors and family members killed since August 2021. Most were either shot or beaten to death in their homes or on the street by the criminals or terrorists they had helped convict. A prosecutor was killed in Nangarhar Province on Aug. 26 that year. Another in Farah the next day. A third, Nusrat Ullah, on Sept. 12. The pattern was not random.
Female prosecutors faced a different but equally final outcome. Those who had spent years building careers in law were stripped of their positions and told to go home. Many received direct threats. Many fled to Pakistan or Iran, where they now face deportation back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Others are in hiding inside Afghanistan. Amnesty International reported in December that “Iran and Pakistan alone have unlawfully expelled more than 2.6 million people to the country this year. About 60 percent of those returned are women and children.”
The Taliban had previously announced a general amnesty for former government workers. But it was no more than a gesture. The United Nations has documented at least 800 human rights violations against former Afghan officials and security forces between August 2021 and June 2023, including more than 200 extrajudicial killings. No one was investigated. No one has been held accountable.
Injustice in the Taliban’s Legal System
The Taliban did not build a different legal system. They eliminated the concept of one. Under the Taliban, courts both investigate and decide criminal cases. A single judge — appointed for Taliban affiliation and for Taliban-aligned religious training rather than legal education — controls all functions. Women may not appear in court except as parties to a dispute, and only then with a male guardian present.
In January 2026, the Taliban issued a Criminal Procedure Code for Courts that formalized this in writing. It criminalizes domestic violence only when a woman has suffered a broken bone or visible injury. It prescribes a three-month prison sentence for any woman who visits her family without her husband’s permission. It accepts slavery. As a former judge in Afghanistan described it to Amnesty International: “In Taliban courts, the voice of a woman is not heard — not because she has nothing to say, but because there is no one left to hear her.”
Today, in addition to widespread repressive measure such as barring females from education above the sixth grade, 1,825 women are held in Taliban prisons, a 435 percent increase since the Taliban took power, according to the regime’s own Interior Ministry. At every stage — investigation, prosecution, defense — there are no women working on their cases, either against them, or in their defense, or ruling as judges. A woman who enters the Taliban legal system is sacrificed twice: first by the society that failed to protect her, and then by a system with no one in it who can speak for her.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in July 2025 for the Taliban’s supreme leader and its chief justice on charges of “ordering, inducing or soliciting the crime against humanity of persecution,” specifically against women, girls, and otherwise on the grounds of gender or gender identity or expression. In October 2025, the U.N. Human Rights Council created the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Afghanistan to collect and preserve evidence of international crimes. These are necessary and meaningful steps. But mechanisms require memory. They require the world to keep paying attention, not only when Afghanistan competes for headlines, but consistently, over time.
In addition to the 57 prosecutors and family members killed, more than 3,800 remain in hiding in Afghanistan, likely still unemployed and facing famine. They are the institutional memory of a justice system. They know how to build cases, train investigators, protect witnesses, and prosecute the crimes the Taliban has now made legal.
After the fall of Kabul, I worked with the U.S. Association of Prosecuting Attorneys to launch the Prosecutors for Prosecutors campaign, an effort to relocate 1,500 prosecutors and their families to safety. The campaign exists because these men and women, who had been trained by the United States and allied nations to uphold rule of law in Afghanistan, do not qualify for Special Immigrant Visas for the United States because they were not U.S. government contractors. Some were jailed. Some were tortured. Many were threatened and ordered not to tell others they had been detained.
As the ICC investigations continue and the U.N. investigative mechanism for Afghanistan proceeds, several specific steps remain within reach. The International Court of Justice and other international human rights treaty bodies should deploy their full accountability tools against Taliban repression — the legal architecture exists; what is required is the political will to use it. The Afghan Adjustment Act, which has stalled in congressional committees for years, could resolve part of this crisis. Congress should reconsider eligibility for Afghans in dangerous situations, including prosecutors and judges who served under U.S.-funded rule-of-law programs — people who stood beside American institutions for two decades and were left behind on a paperwork technicality. The U.S. Association of Prosecuting Attorneys and the Prosecutors for Prosecutors campaign are prepared to bring these cases directly to senators and congressional representatives in their home states and districts. The State Department should fund the Prosecutors for Prosecutors campaign directly, as it does for similar relocation efforts in other conflict zones. The U.N. accountability mechanism should prioritize evidence collection on the targeted killing of prosecutors, whose murders represent the deliberate destruction of institutional memory. And the international community should resist normalizing Taliban governance through trade or diplomatic engagement that is not conditioned on minimum protections for women and former justice officials.
This piece was not written to assign blame. I wrote it because the people who built Afghanistan’s legal system, who showed up every day knowing the risks, who believed their country could become something different, deserve action just as robust to defend them now. They must not be forgotten.
Withdrawal from Afghanistan should not mean withdrawal from all promises, all ethical obligations, all human rights obligations. Justice in Afghanistan is not finished. It is only interrupted. The discernment comes when the world makes the choice to call their representatives, to ask for their allies to be accounted for.
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(The author extends sincere thanks to Negar Hamidi, who contributed immensely to the research and writing of this piece.)
