fil photo/ Volker Turk, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Afghanistan has become a "graveyard for human rights," the United Nations high commissioner for human rights said on Thursday, warning that an expanding body of Taliban decrees is entrenching repression, particularly against women and girls.

Speaking at the 61st session of the UN Human Rights Council, Volker Turk said a "cascade of edicts and laws" issued since the Taliban returned to power in 2021 has had a "crushing impact" on the Afghan people and is being codified into an increasingly broad legal framework.

"A new decree signed by the Taliban leader last month defines several crimes and punishments that contravene Afghanistan`s international legal obligations," Turk said. The decree expands the number of offenses carrying the death penalty and provides for corporal punishment for numerous acts, including within the home, which he said legitimizes violence against women and children. It also criminalizes criticism of Taliban leaders and their policies, in violation of freedoms of expression and assembly.

"I urge the Taliban to rescind this decree and to bring all measures into line with their international obligations," he said.

Turk described the situation of women and girls as amounting to persecution. "The system of segregation is reminiscent of apartheid, based on gender rather than race," he said, adding that the Taliban have effectively criminalized the presence of women and girls in public life.

Women are barred from secondary and higher education and from most employment, he said, and face restrictions on health care, movement, civic participation and expression. He also cited enforcement of the Taliban`s law on the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice, which has imposed rules on men`s beards, mandatory hijab for women, male guardianship requirements, bans on music and images of living beings, and compulsory prayers.

Since Sept. 7, 2025, the Taliban have also prevented Afghan women - including UN staff members, contractors and visitors - from entering UN-owned premises across the country, he said.

Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, also addressed the Council, describing what he called a deepening crisis in health and human rights under Taliban rule.

"The longer this attack on women`s rights is allowed to continue, the more the Taliban will feel emboldened," Bennett said. "Member states must forcefully demand the ban`s immediate reversal."

He warned that Afghanistan was facing a profound deterioration, saying that when he addressed the Council a year ago he had cautioned that the Taliban were consolidating control over nearly every aspect of people`s lives and that the already grave situation was likely to worsen.

At the same time, 33 women`s rights organizations said in an open letter to the president of the 80th session of the UN General Assembly that the Taliban were "deliberately, systematically and step by step" pushing women toward complete structural elimination from society.

The Human Rights Council session focused heavily on Afghanistan, with officials and activists warning that the steady accumulation of restrictions risks normalizing what they describe as institutionalized gender discrimination and repression.