Taliban Criminal Procedure Code 2026

The Taliban’s new Criminal Procedure Code, enforced nationwide in January 2026, is being marketed as a technical fix for Afghanistan’s courts. That framing is the first deception. A real procedure code tells you how arrests happen, how evidence is weighed, how trials are run, how appeals work, and how the state is kept within limits. This document does something else. It stretches the procedure into a total moral and political order. It regulates belief, loyalty, social behavior, and family life, then uses courts to punish anything that threatens the movement’s control. The law is not sitting above politics. It is politics, written as punishment.

The most important test of any justice system is simple: can an ordinary person predict the consequences of the state’s power and defend themselves against it? Under the Taliban code, that predictability collapses. When offenses are broad and elastic, authorities do not need proof in the normal sense; they need a narrative.

When punishments depend on who you are, rather than what you did, the law becomes a social sorting machine. And when criticism of rulers is treated as a criminal act, courts stop being a forum for truth and become a stage where the state performs its dominance

The code’s class structure is not just unfair; it is a declaration of intent. Dividing people into scholars, elites, middle class, and lower class, and assigning different responses for the same conduct, makes inequality the official doctrine of justice. Advice for one group, summons for another, prison for the next, and prison plus corporal punishment for the poor is not a legal system trying to correct behavior. It is a system trying to protect a hierarchy. Once that hierarchy is codified, abuse becomes “legal” by definition. The poor learn that the law is a trap. The privileged learn that the law is a shield.

This is also where the Taliban’s religious claims break down most clearly. Islamic justice, as understood across major schools, is built on accountability, evidence, and equal treatment in principle. The idea that status changes the weight of punishment clashes with the moral center of Islam, which ties responsibility to actions, not rank. The Prophetic warning about societies collapsing when the powerful are spared, and the weak are punished, is a direct rebuke to class justice. A code that protects scholars and elites while striking hardest at the lower class is not defending religion. It is using religious language to defend privilege.

The code also rewrites politics as theology. Opposition becomes rebellion or corruption, punishable by death, and criticism of Taliban leaders becomes an offense that can bring flogging and imprisonment. Even non-participation becomes risky through duties to report. This is a move seen in many authoritarian systems: the ruler turns dissent into a moral stain, then calls punishment purification. But Islamic governance, in its early ideals, treated consultation and accountability as virtues. Leaders were questioned. Complaints were heard.

Power was not meant to be sacred. The Taliban approach flips that tradition, demanding obedience as a religious obligation and treating scrutiny as sin

Social control is another theme running through the code. Criminalizing cultural practices such as dancing or attending certain gatherings is not about public safety. It is about ownership of public space. Culture gives people identity outside the state. It creates bonds, memory, and joy that do not need permission. Authoritarian movements fear that kind of independent life because it competes with their story. So they redefine culture as crime, then claim they are saving society while they are actually shrinking it.

Women face a sharper edge of the same logic. The code criminalizes repeated visits to a woman’s parental home without a husband’s permission and threatens imprisonment if she refuses to return. It authorizes husbands and guardians to punish. It then narrows recognition of violence against women to cases of severe visible injury, leaving the common realities of coercion and humiliation largely untouched. This is not merely harsh. It is a legal design that moves control from the state into the household, turning the family into an enforcement unit. It treats women as managed dependents rather than as full legal persons. That stands against both the ethical aims of Islam and Afghanistan’s own social complexity, where women have long been central to family networks, caregiving, education, and community life.

One of the darkest signals in the code is its repeated legal acknowledgment of slavery as a category. Even if presented as an inherited doctrine, placing slavery back into the legal structure in modern Afghanistan is a statement that human hierarchy is acceptable, even desirable. Islamic tradition contains a long historical record in which emancipation was praised and encouraged, and in which dignity was tied to freeing people, not owning them.

Keeping slavery in law today is not fidelity to faith. It is a choice to revive domination

From a governance angle, the Taliban code is also self-defeating. Stable states depend on clear law, restrained enforcement, and public trust that disputes can be resolved without fear. Vague crimes and discretionary punishments destroy trust. Class-based penalties create resentment. Mandatory reporting breeds suspicion inside communities. When law becomes a weapon, citizens do not cooperate with institutions; they try to avoid them, bribe them, or fight them. That does not produce order. It produces quiet chaos, where people survive by staying invisible.

If the Taliban wanted legitimacy, they would build a justice system that limits power, protects the vulnerable, and holds rulers accountable. Instead, this code treats power as sacred and the public as suspect. It confuses control with morality and calls submission justice. Afghanistan has seen many forms of coercion, but a legal code that turns ideology into criminal procedure takes coercion into everyday life. It does not just punish crimes. It manufactures criminals, then uses their punishment to remind everyone else to stay silent.