Five years after its military takeover of Afghanistan, the Taliban still cannot point to anything resembling a state that serves its people — let alone one that honors the country’s international obligations. Since April 2022, when I urged the international community to take protecting Afghan human rights seriously, the Taliban’s compliance record has only deteriorated further. What has endured is the extraordinary resilience of Afghanistan’s civil society and its women’s rights groups. Together, they have pursued a half decade of quiet and deliberate diplomacy in multilateral settings. Through this work, they have denied the Taliban the thing it has sought the most since it returned to power: legal recognition as Afghanistan’s legitimate government.
This fact deserves a headline this week, but most anniversary commentary will likely skip past it. The Taliban has failed, comprehensively and by design, to comply with the treaties Afghanistan ratified decades before the Taliban seized power: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR); the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; the Convention on the Rights of the Child; and the Convention against Torture. Yet thankfully Afghanistan’s standing within the United Nations system has not lapsed alongside the Taliban’s record of non-compliance. Afghanistan still has a seat at the U.N., but the Taliban is not sitting in it. Instead, the seat is held by an independent representative of Afghanistan, while the Taliban remains unrecognized. This has given an opportunity for Afghanistan’s women’s rights defenders, civil and democratic forces, and non-Taliban Afghans to have a space and a voice outside the regime’s control.
The Taliban’s Record: Breaking Afghanistan’s Treaty Obligations
Afghanistan now ranks 175th of 180 countries on press freedom, and U.N. reporting documents arbitrary detention becoming routine and human rights deteriorating rather than stabilizing.
Life in Afghanistan is worsening, but not just through government neglect: the Taliban has instituted a legal framework that systematically violates Afghanistan’s core binding international commitments, most notably CEDAW, the ICCPR, and the Convention Against Torture. The Taliban’s framework was formalized through the draconian Law on the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, enacted Aug. 21, 2024. It mandates the total covering of women in public and criminalizes even the sound of a woman’s voice outside the home.
Meanwhile, the Taliban’s education ban — the only one of its kind in the world — has kept roughly 2.2 million girls out of secondary school and university. This year’s university entrance exams drew some 120,000 candidates and, for the fourth consecutive year, not a single woman. This repression deepened with the Criminal Procedure Code, enacted in January. It criminalizes criticism of the Taliban and obliges people to report on one another, and in the same stroke effectively legalizes domestic violence, stipulating that physical abuse of a wife is only punishable if it leaves open wounds or broken bones. Women can now be imprisoned if they leave home without a husband’s consent, as can family members who assist them. Executive decrees on the separation of couples, capped by the Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses enacted in May — which annulled prior divorces and forced women back to abusive spouses — complete an unprecedented system of institutionalized gender persecution.
Because state responsibility under international law falls on Afghanistan rather than on those controlling the government in Kabul, the country remains accountable regardless of who is violating its obligations. The Taliban has refused to acknowledge the treaty bodies or submit the compliance reports that are required. The Permanent Mission of Afghanistan to the U.N. in Geneva, which has remained unchanged since August 2021 and where I continue to serve, has fulfilled that sovereign duty on at least two occasions, compiling country reports to the CEDAW Committee and the Universal Periodic Review Working Group. That documentation, coupled with the concluding observations of the CEDAW, kept the international record intact. It also supplied a credible foundation on which Australia, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands could, should they elect to do so, advance the proceedings against Afghanistan to the International Court of Justice, since Afghanistan has not agreed to allow individuals to bring claims directly.
Given the level of systematic abuse and repression, the International Criminal Court, on July 8, 2025, issued its first-ever arrest warrants for the Taliban’s supreme leader and its chief justice for gender persecution as a crime against humanity.
New York: A Seat the Taliban Still Cannot Claim
Five years and roughly a dozen sessions of the U.N. Credentials Committee later, the Taliban still has not obtained Afghanistan’s seat at the U.N. The Committee includes the United States, Russia, and China among its nine members. It rarely aligns on much, but it has deferred a decision on giving the seat to the Taliban every year since 2021. It most recently confirmed this stance on Aug. 4, when a U.N. spokesperson stated plainly that no U.N. member state has moved to transfer the seat and that recognition of the Taliban remains a decision for individual governments, not the U.N.
The result is what one observer rightly called a diplomatic oddity: the Taliban control the territory, while Afghanistan’s seat in New York continues to be held by a senior diplomat appointed under the previous government. Due to the Permanent Mission’s financial constraints, the General Assembly stripped Afghanistan of its voting rights in 2024, but the seat itself and the credentials attached to it have not been transferred to the Taliban. That deferral of credentials is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is the mechanism, repeated annually, that has denied the Taliban the single most consequential form of international recognition, and its status has held only because member states keep choosing, year after year, not to change it.
Geneva: Keeping the Treaty Obligations Alive
Afghanistan’s obligation to appear before the U.N. Human Rights Council, where the country was a member for the first time in its history (2018-2020), did not disappear when the Taliban returned to power. On April 29, 2024, the Permanent Mission in Geneva presented Afghanistan’s fourth-cycle Universal Periodic Review national report. The review generated 243 recommendations from 70 states, and the Mission committed to reporting back on the implementation of the recommendations. The same is true of the CEDAW review: in June 2025, the Committee reviewed Afghanistan’s periodic report, submitted by the Permanent Mission, and, in a first for the treaty body system, held a public dialogue with a delegation of former officials and women’s rights leaders in exile. The Taliban were invited to participate but did not respond.
Thanks to the work done by the Permanent Mission, the international system has taken additional steps to hold the Taliban accountable. The Human Rights Council established the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Afghanistan (IIM-Afghanistan) on Oct. 6, 2025, to collect and preserve evidence for future prosecutions. The Council will assess its operational capacity at its 66th session. The ICC’s warrants exist because the documented pattern of crimes gave prosecutors a case to act on. The term “gender apartheid” to describe what is happening in Afghanistan is being used more widely in human rights discourse. The situation has led to a concerted international campaign underway to include it as a crime against humanity in an international treaty.
Vienna: Contesting the Taliban’s Narrative
Vienna hosts the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. Industrial Development Organization, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization. Afghanistan’s mission there, the least visible of the three, has used its platform to contest one of the Taliban’s few claimed policy successes. At the 69th session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs in March, the Mission told member states that despite Taliban claims of having banned poppy cultivation, enforcement has been inconsistent and the country is seeing a shift toward synthetic drugs, particularly methamphetamine. The mission has also kept the education ban and the deterioration of women’s rights on the agenda of OSCE-related meetings throughout the year. This work rarely makes headlines precisely because it is procedural and unglamorous.
Taken together, the three missions tell the same story: nowhere in the international system has the Taliban converted territorial control into meaningful recognition.
Where States Are Failing
It would be less than honest, however, if we did not also call out the failure of states that profess to care about the fate of the Afghan people. Only Russia has extended formal diplomatic recognition to the Taliban, but withholding formal recognition has not stopped roughly 20 European governments from pressing Brussels to open deportation talks with the Taliban.
Anytime a government treats engagement with the Taliban as a transactional deal it suggests to the Taliban that its human rights and terrorism record is negotiable. It must never be.
What Must the U.N. and Member States Do?
The inglorious fifth anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power falls just three weeks prior to the 63rd session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, where the mandate of the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan is up for renewal. At the same time, the IIM-Afghanistan, which is charged with collecting and preserving evidence of international crimes, is still building toward full operational capacity.
There are several steps that can be taken to support this accountability work.
First, the IIM-Afghanistan needs sufficient resources. Proper funding — an estimated $1.9 million — will enable it to build cases usable by international tribunals, national courts exercising universal jurisdiction, and by future transitional justice processes inside the country.
Second, states weighing any step toward normalization, pseudo recognition, resumed deportations to Afghanistan, or an expanded diplomatic footprint for the Taliban should be required to explain publicly how that step is consistent with their international obligations and the Taliban’s human rights record.
It is also crucial for the missions themselves to be protected. The work being done in New York, Geneva, and Vienna is not self-sustaining. It depends on support and political will that member states can withdraw as easily as they extend it. Member states must remain strong in their conviction that the Taliban should not receive credentials at the U.N.
The spaces that civil society and women’s rights groups have carved out in New York, Geneva, and Vienna over five years, often at enormous personal risk to colleagues and family members still inside Afghanistan, needs to be expanded, not merely tolerated. They are not a constituency to be only consulted occasionally; together with the three missions, they are the reason there is an Afghanistan at the U.N. at all.
The U.N. General Assembly in its upcoming session in September should put political weight behind not only humanitarian relief and monitoring, but also a political process for a peaceful settlement in Afghanistan, a recommendation outlined in the U.N. independent assessment on Afghanistan that was submitted to the Security Council in November 2023. The document recommended a U.N. special envoy for diplomacy and intra-Afghanistan dialogue, distinct from the U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Representative inside the country. Such an envoy, based outside Taliban control in Geneva or New York, should reach out to opposition forces, exiled political actors, and civil society, and start building the political mechanism a durable settlement needs. At such a critical juncture, when resistance to the Taliban is picking up momentum, and the Taliban’s failures to govern are becoming intolerable, this recommendation for a special envoy deserves implementation, not another mention in a resolution.
Finally, the U.N. should keep the IIM-Afghanistan and the Special Rapporteur’s mandate in Geneva. A proposal to relocate elements of that architecture to Vienna, reportedly to save costs, misunderstands what the mechanism needs. Geneva is where the Human Rights Council and the treaty bodies carrying Afghanistan’s case operate, and where civil society and women’s rights groups are engaged. Removing the mechanism from that ecosystem might save money but it would add other costs that Afghanistan’s already-stretched missions and civil society groups would have to absorb. Similar mechanisms for Myanmar and Syria are in Geneva for the same reason. Afghanistan’s should stay there too.
Five years ago this month, the government in Kabul fell, and the Taliban’s promise of peace, conciliation, and inclusivity, which it made in Doha, was broken within months. What continues, however, is our spirit of resistance, our women’s fight for rights, documentation of the Taliban’s atrocities, and the permanent missions at the U.N. To make sure these survive another five years requires the steadfast commitment of the international community.
