New Delhi: Several UN experts, including Richard Bennett, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, have warned against normalising Taliban rule after five years of systematic repression.Drawing attention to the situation of girls and women – who remain barred from secondary and higher education, and face sweeping restrictions on employment, movement, healthcare, public life and justice – experts describe this institutionalised gender discrimination as persecution and gender apartheid.The statement is a call for accountability, humanitarian assistance, protection for vulnerable Afghans, meaningful participation of women, and measurable human-rights progress before any international recognition or accommodation of the Taliban.It comes as India last week cited its deepening engagement with Afghanistan ahead of an upcoming reception at the Afghan embassy in New Delhi marking the fifth anniversary of the Taliban’s takeover of the country, which is likely to be attended by senior Indian officials. The full statement is below. §Five years is a short period in the life of a country but a very long one in the life of a child. A generation of girls has now missed secondary education. Another generation of young women has lost the possibility to pursue university studies. Thousands find themselves still confined to their homes or, worse, married against their will.Moreover, a generation of boys is coming of age in an environment that normalises discrimination and violence.After five years of Taliban rule, one of the very few things to celebrate is that girls and women have not given up hope that enjoyment of their fundamental rights will be restored. We stand in solidarity with their aspirations for a dignified life and also with their calls for urgent reform and accountability.A year ago, we warned against the normalisation of Taliban rule. We repeat that warning today with greater urgency, because the temptation to normalise has grown while the grounds to justify it have not. The idea that Taliban oppression is a reality that must be accepted to encourage moderation remains dangerous and misguided. Five years of evidence demonstrates the Taliban’s intent to deepen their grip, not loosen it.Normalising a regime that systematically persecutes more than half of its population does not promote change; it legitimises oppression.It is premature to invite Taliban representatives to capitals or to accept their diplomats. This is de facto recognition and reflects a double standard of hailing human rights with one hand while pandering to domestic politics with the other.Over these five years the Taliban, exercising government-like functions as de facto authorities, have enforced a growing web of edicts and institutional controls that has reshaped nearly every aspect of public and private life, engineering a society founded on ideological conformity, fear and exclusion.We reiterate that the institutionalised system of gender discrimination, domination and oppression amounts to the crime against humanity of persecution on grounds of gender. It is also appropriately described as gender apartheid. The Taliban’s invocation of religion and culture does not alter that characterisation. It is long established that “all human rights are universal, indivisible, and interdependent and interrelated”, and that “while the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne it mind, it is the duty of States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote and protect all human rights”. The International Criminal Court, which in 2025 issued arrest warrants for the Taliban’s Supreme Leader and Chief Justice for the crime against humanity of gender persecution should be given resolute support from States.Every restriction we condemned a year ago remains in force, and their cumulative effect has deepened. The ban on education for girls beyond grade six has lasted five years. Women and girls remain excluded many forms of from employment, movement without a male guardian, healthcare, justice, sport, cultural life, public spaces and public affairs. Specialized protection and support institutions and frameworks for women and children remain dismantled, leaving them without legal or physical protection and exposing them to heightened risk of violations, abuse, and exploitation. Even the capacity to assess the full extent of the harm has been undermined: the institutions that once recorded and prosecuted violence against women have been abolished or hollowed out, so that its true scale, including that of violence against women and girls, can no longer be assessed. Dismantling the means of recording and redressing such violence is itself a grave violation.Child and forced marriage remain widespread despite their formal prohibition. Enforcement of the bans has hardened. Women have been turned away from hospitals and clinics for their attire or for lacking a male guardian; after one such instruction in Herat, patient admissions at the provincial hospital fell by more than a quarter within two days. In June 2026, at least 30 women and girls were jailed in that city for not wearing chadors, and when residents protested peacefully, security forces opened fire, killing 2 people, including a boy.Codification is reinforcing the machinery of repression; for example through the 2024 so-called law on promotion of virtue and prevention of vice, the 2025 decree on preachers and, this year, the decrees on the so-called criminal rules of courts and on the separation of spouses. Most provisions of these instruments grossly contravene Afghanistan’s human rights obligations under the treaties it has ratified. Those obligations remain binding irrespective of who exercises authority.We remain deeply alarmed by the continued use of corporal and capital punishment, in violation of the right to life and the absolute peremptory prohibition of torture. In 2025 alone, more people were publicly flogged than in all previous years of Taliban rule combined: the de facto Supreme Court announced the flogging of at least 1,110 people, including at least 170 women, and the escalation has continued into 2026. At least 12 men have been publicly executed since August 2021.While women and girls bear the brunt of the Taliban regime, the same logic of enforced conformity and repression of all expressions of diversity reaches everyone who departs from the Taliban’s singular model of society. Shia, Sikh, Hindu, Baha’i and Christian communities are targeted for their faith and identity. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other gender-diverse (LGBT+) persons face corporal and potentially capital punishment, and violence within their own families, with nowhere to turn for protection. Persons with disabilities are pushed out of education, healthcare and livelihoods. Journalists, educators, judges, lawyers, human rights defenders and former officials are punished for what they did, wrote or represented before August 2021. No form of dissent is tolerated, and grave abuses continue under the banner of national security and counter-terrorism, including acts tantamount to enforced disappearance.Civic space remains obliterated. Women human rights defenders face arbitrary arrest and detention, acts tantamount to enforced disappearance, harassment, home raids, and torture and ill-treatment in detention, and advocacy can only be conducted clandestinely. The Taliban’s stranglehold on the media has tightened further through new edicts, continued detentions of journalists and pervasive censorship.These violations unfold against the enduring legacy of decades of conflict and a deepening humanitarian crisis. Since October 2025, cross-border hostilities have killed 499 civilians and injured more than 1,200 in Afghanistan, among them scores of women and children. Attacks by Pakistani forces have struck homes and, in one June 2026 incident, hitting the same house a second time, some twenty minutes after the first strike, while residents dug survivors from the rubble. Some 269 patients, all men, were killed in an airstrike by Pakistan on the Omid Drug Rehabilitation Centre in Kabul on 16 March 2026. All alleged violations of international humanitarian law, by all parties must be impartially investigated. Those responsible must be held to account.Millions of Afghans have meanwhile been returned from Iran and Pakistan, many forcibly and some of them after having been earlier subjected to enforced disappearance, into a country where humanitarian funding has collapsed and poverty is entrenched. European leaders have also publicly expressed their intent to organize forced returns to Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not a safe country to be removed to, particularly for certain groups that face heightened protection risks, including LGBT persons, those perceived to be affiliated with the former Islamic Republic, and human rights defenders. Mass returns and forced deportations must cease.The experts also drew attention to the depth of Afghanistan’s food crisis, among the most severe and most neglected in the world, the result of decades of systematic violations of the right to food in a protracted crisis. Over the past winter, more than 17 million people — more than a third of the population — faced acute food insecurity, with nearly 4 million children acutely malnourished and around 1 million so severely malnourished as to require hospital treatment. “When food assistance reaches barely 2.7 per cent of the population, hunger is no longer a risk; it is a daily reality severely infringing upon human dignity,” the experts said. The crisis has been aggravated by drought across many provinces, a contracting economy, the collapse of humanitarian funding, and the mass return of over 2.5 million people from neighbouring countries.The impact of the food crisis falls disproportionately on women and girls. Restrictions on their movement, employment and access to services leave women-headed households least able to earn an income or to reach what assistance remains, while the contraction of humanitarian operations — driven by the loss of donor funding, international isolation and the freezing of national assets — deepens their exclusion.Countering this repression continues to require an “all-tools” approach. Last year we called for a complementary investigative mechanism; in October 2025, the Human Rights Council established the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Afghanistan. It must not remain an achievement on paper: it requires full resourcing, staffing without delay, dedicated gender expertise from the outset, meaningful participation/consultation of Afghan civil society, especially women, and active State cooperation, including information-sharing. We also called for the codification of the crime of gender apartheid; that work is being carried into the negotiation of the convention on crimes against humanity. The remaining elements are unchanged: principled pressure; support for civil society, especially women-led organisations; humanitarian funding; and protection for Afghan refugees, displaced persons and those in exile.To States, we say: there should be no move to normalise the de facto authorities unless and until there is demonstrated, measurable and independently verified progress against human rights benchmarks, particularly for women and girls. This applies equally to engagement convened under United Nations auspices: no process concerning Afghanistan’s future should proceed without the full and meaningful participation of Afghan women. A regime built on human rights violations, entrenched oppression and radicalisation cannot deliver the stability the region needs and seeks, and accommodation without conditions will bring neither security nor peace.The experts further urged States to restore and sustain humanitarian funding, to shield food-security operations from the collateral effects of sanctions, and to ensure that women and women-led organisations can both deliver and receive assistance, including to restore their capacity to feed themselves and their communities. “All human rights, including the rights to adequate food, health and standard of living, must be guaranteed to every Afghan — and it cannot be realised while half the population is barred from public life,” the experts said.To the Taliban, we repeat the calls of the Afghan people and of the international community: honour the human rights of Afghans and the treaty obligations Afghanistan has ratified, reverse the policies that violate them, and end the forceful imposition of a singular model on a diverse country.A year ago, we said that every day without action strengthens the Taliban’s grip. A year has passed. Aid was cut, Afghans were deported back to a country where they face great risks, and accommodation of the de facto authorities advanced. A girl who was in grade six when the ban began has turned 18 without another day of school. Yet, because Afghans and those who stood with them persisted, accountability has begun: the two most senior figures of this system are wanted by the International Criminal Court, and a mechanism now exists to preserve the evidence of their crimes. That progress must be protected. For five years Afghans’ human rights have been systematically violated yet many bravely strive to restore them, despite the odds; the international community must not let them down again.