The Taliban has passed a law that allows men to beat their wives as long as it does not cause "broken bones or open wounds".
The Telegraph obtained the 60-page penal code – signed by Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban supreme leader, and distributed to courts across Afghanistan – which classifies spousal beatings as "ta'zir" – discretionary punishment – rather than a criminal act.
A husband may strike his wife and children freely, provided the violence does not leave visible bone fractures or open wounds.
Even where serious injury can be proven, the maximum sentence is 15 days in prison.
The law is written to ensure that the bar is almost never met.
To pursue a complaint, a woman must present her wounds in person to a male judge while remaining fully veiled and accompanied by a male guardian.
In the majority of domestic violence cases, that guardian is the husband who committed the beating.
There is no provision in the code prohibiting physical, psychological or sexual violenceagainst women.
For those who do attempt to flee, thelaw offers another trap.
Article 34 says that a woman who goes to her parents' home without her husband's permission – even to escape violence – faces up to three months in prison. Family members who shelter her face the same sentence.
The code dismantles the legal framework established under Afghanistan's previous government, including a 2009 law that criminalised forced marriage, rape and gender-based violence and imposed sentences of between three months and one year for domestic abuse.
Working-class Afghans at the bottom of the hierarchy face imprisonment and corporal punishment.
The code explicitly distinguishes between"free" citizensand "slaves."
The requirement to bring a male chaperone to court – where that chaperone is, in most cases, the abuser – makes justice structurally impossible.
The criminalisation of fleeing to a parent's home makes escape structurally impossible.
The Taliban has since ruled that discussing the penal code is itself a criminal offence.
Narges, a former university student in western Herat, told The Telegraph: "The world has always shown its unjust side to us. I do not feel like I am living, and this feeling is shared by everyone I know."
She added: "Our life is more like a constant resistance against everything out there. No one sees us.No one cares about us.
"This new law is not just a law – it is making our bodies their field of control.No one would see our painunless our bones are broken. They are legalising fear. We are living in fear and silence."
Article 59 criminalises dancing – performing it and watching it – without providing any legal definition of what dancing constitutes.
"Dance for boys and girls, and those who play music for them, or the people who watch (attend) the show, are all criminals. The judge shall sentence each one of them to two months' imprisonment."
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The new law also criminalises thought. Criticising any action banned by the Taliban leadership is itself a criminal offence, including criticism of the ban on girls' education, which Taliban courts now classify as a lawful restriction.
Under Article 23, insulting Taliban leaders carries 20 lashes and six months in prison.
Any Afghan who witnesses opposition activity and fails to report it to Taliban authorities faces two years in prison.
There is no right to a lawyer anywhere in the legal document.
The entire edifice of fair trial has been stripped out and replaced with the discretion of Taliban judges, operating without oversight, without appeal, and now with the force of signed, distributed, enacted law.
Religious minorities face their own specific jeopardy.
Article 2 designates followers of non-Hanafi Islamic schools – including Shia Muslims, Ismailis, Salafis and Ahl-e-Hadith, roughly 15 per cent of the population – as "innovators" or apostates.
Teachers are permitted to beat children in their care, with only the most extreme injuries – broken bones, torn skin, heavy bruising – defined as excess.
Other physical violence, all psychological violence, all sexual violence against children are not prohibited.
Article 48 explicitly permits fathers to physically punish sons from the age of 10. The code frames this as acting in the child's interest.
Article 9 divides Afghan society into four formal tiers: religious scholars, elites, middle class, lower class.
The same crime committed by a scholar earns advice. Committed by an elite, it earns a court summons. If committed by a middle-class Afghan, the punishment is prison. And if committed by a working-class Afghan, the result is prison and corporal punishment.
Article 17 criminalises "mockery" of Islamic rulings with two years in prison, with no definition of what mockery means, leaving judges to decide arbitrarily.
Since returning to power in August 2021, the Taliban has systematically curbed women's rights in Afghanistan.
The restrictionsaffect their daily lives, ranging from preventing them from showing their faces in public or driving a car, to forbidding conversations with men and restricting how they dress.
Women have already been ordered to cover their faces "to avoid temptation and tempting others" and refrain from speaking in the presence of unfamiliar men who are not husbands or close relatives.
Afghan women have also been ordered not to speak loudly inside their homes, to prevent their voices from being heard outside.
Women who defy the new rules will be arrested and sent to prison, the Taliban said.
In July 2024, a United Nations report said the ministry for promoting virtue and preventing vice was contributing to a climate of fear and intimidation among Afghans through its edicts and the methods used to enforce them.
However, in recent months, there have been increasing signs of discord from within the ranks of the Taliban as it tries to transform itself from a guerrilla force to a functioning government.
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