What the Record Shows About Women Under the Taliban and Iran

On the morning of March 23, 2022, Afghan girls in grades seven through twelve put on their uniforms and went back to school. The Taliban's education ministry had announced the reopening. Some girls were already in their classrooms when the order was reversed. They were sent home the same day, and secondary schools for girls have stayed shut ever since.

That single reversal is the cleanest way into a record that's now three and a half years deep and almost entirely documented in writing. Not rumor. Decrees, ministry statements, UN reports, and, as of last summer, arrest warrants.

The decree trail in Kabul

Kabul fell on August 15, 2021. Within weeks the Ministry of Women's Affairs was gone, its building handed to the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. In September 2021 boys in grades seven and above were told to return to class. Girls were told to wait.

The rest arrived in pieces, which is part of why it's hard to hold in your head:

• May 2022. A decree from the Taliban's supreme leader required women to cover their faces in public and said a male relative would answer for violations.
• Travel. Women barred from journeys beyond roughly 45 miles without a mahram, a close male relative.
• November 2022. Women banned from parks, gyms and public bathhouses in Kabul.
• December 20, 2022. Universities closed to women, nationwide, indefinitely.
• December 24, 2022. Afghan women barred from working for non-governmental organizations. In April 2023 that was extended to the United Nations itself, which meant Afghan women could no longer report to work at UN offices in their own country.
• July 2023. Beauty salons ordered closed. They had been one of the last places women could earn money among other women.
• August 21, 2024. A 35-article "vice and virtue" law was published in the official gazette, codifying what had been a patchwork of edicts. UNAMA's analysis of the text noted provisions treating a woman's voice in public as something to be restrained, including singing and reciting aloud outside the home.
• Late 2024. Reports from multiple outlets and aid agencies that women were being turned away from midwifery and nursing institutes, closing one of the last training pipelines for women who treat women. A separate order barred new buildings from having windows overlooking yards, kitchens or wells used by women.

UNESCO has put the number of girls deliberately shut out of secondary education at 1.4 million.

The part that's now in front of judges

Richard Bennett, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Afghanistan, has used the term "gender apartheid" in his reporting. The Taliban barred him from the country in 2023, which tells you roughly how the reports were received.

Two legal tracks are live.

In September 2024, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands and Australia announced they intended to bring Afghanistan before the International Court of Justice for breaching the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, a treaty Afghanistan ratified in 2003.

Then on July 8, 2025, Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani, for the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds. The ICC has charged gender persecution before. It had never built a case like this one, where the alleged crime is the policy itself.

Neither man is in custody. Neither is likely to be. Russia formally recognized the Taliban government on July 3, 2025, the first state to do so, and a warrant means nothing without a country willing to serve it.

Iran is a different machine entirely

Lumping the two together is the most common mistake, and it gets the Iranian case wrong in a way that matters.

Iranian women drive. They vote. They sit in parliament, practice medicine, run businesses, and have for years made up roughly half the university student body. Iran doesn't ban women from public life. It builds legal disadvantage into the code and then polices the dress.

The Civil Code sets the marriage age for girls at 13, with judicial permission available below that. Marriage requires the consent of a father or paternal grandfather. Custody, inheritance and the weight given to a woman's testimony in certain proceedings are unequal by statute. The Guardian Council has never approved a woman's candidacy for president. Women were kept out of soccer stadiums for decades; that only began to loosen after FIFA pressure in 2019, and access has been partial and inconsistent since.

What the Amini case produced on paper

Mahsa Amini, also called Jina, was arrested in Tehran by the Gasht-e Ershad, the morality police, on September 13, 2022, over her hijab. She died in custody on September 16. Authorities said it was a pre-existing condition. Protests ran for months across the country under the slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom."

On November 24, 2022, the UN Human Rights Council created an Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran. Its March 2024 report is the document to read if you read only one. The mission concluded that Iranian security forces committed crimes against humanity, including murder, imprisonment, torture, rape and gender persecution, and found that at least 551 protesters had been killed, among them dozens of women and children.

Narges Mohammadi, jailed in Evin prison, won the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize. Her children accepted it in Oslo because she could not. She was released on medical furlough in December 2024.

The law they passed, then didn't enforce

Iran's parliament approved a "Hijab and Chastity" bill in 2023. It cleared the Guardian Council and was set to take effect on December 13, 2024. The text stacked escalating fines, travel and driving bans, and prison exposure for what it called organized promotion of unveiling, plus penalties on businesses that served unveiled customers.

Then the government shelved it. It hasn't been implemented.

That pause is the most revealing fact in the whole Iranian file. Enforcement has been running in the other direction anyway: the "Noor" plan, launched in April 2024, put patrols back on the streets, and rights groups have documented traffic cameras flagging unveiled drivers, warning texts, and impounded cars. The regime concluded the written law was more dangerous to itself than the unwritten one.

How to check any of this yourself

Everything above sits in primary documents, and none of them are behind a paywall.

• UNAMA publishes periodic reports on Taliban decrees, with the text and dates.
• OHCHR hosts the Special Rapporteur's reports on Afghanistan and the full Iran Fact-Finding Mission findings.
• The ICC posts its own press releases on warrants, including the July 2025 pair.
• Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch keep dated country pages with individual cases named.

Read the actual decree before you repeat a claim about it. A fair number of viral posts about both countries describe rules that were proposed and withdrawn, or enforced in one province and not another. The real record is severe enough that you never need to improve on it.

The Afghan girls who were sent home that March morning are in their twenties now. They finished sixth grade. That's the whole of it.