The International Criminal Court has unsealed arrest warrants for two additional Taliban leaders — Education Minister Habibullah Agha and Higher Education Minister Neda Mohammad Nadim — on charges of crimes against humanity for the systematic persecution of women, girls, and those who do not conform to the Taliban’s imposed gender norms.

The warrants, announced by ICC Pre-Trial Chamber II, add to existing warrants for Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani. Their inclusion is significant: by naming the ministers responsible for education policy, the Court has placed the dismantling of girls’ and women’s education at the centre of its case — a development that directly reflects the evidence HAMRAH and its members have spent years building.

Years of Documentation Behind the Decision

The warrants follow five years of sustained documentation and legal advocacy by Afghan civil society organisations, including HAMRAH members, many of them operating from exile. Afghan organisations have systematically recorded violations, supported survivors, and argued across legal and political forums that gender persecution meets the threshold for a crime against humanity. 

Several HAMRAH members have been directly involved in the accountability effort. Afghanistan LGBTIQ+ Organisation (ALO), Dialogue Hub for Common Ground, Development Research Group, Zan Times, Nimrokh, and the Rahyab Initiative have contributed to case-building, victim support, and the legal argumentation underpinning the gender persecution framework.

ALO’s contribution has been particularly significant in broadening the evidentiary record. LGBTIQ+ Afghans face some of the most acute persecution under Taliban rule, and testimony gathered by ALO has helped establish that the Taliban’s gender order targets not only women and girls, but everyone who falls outside its prescribed roles.

In June 2026, HAMRAH published Taliban Madrasas: Ideological Consolidation, Gender Persecution and Afghanistan’s Future Stability — documenting how the Taliban have built a parallel religious education system that now outnumbers Afghanistan’s public schools, and how that system functions as infrastructure for institutionalising gender persecution across a generation. Its findings speak directly to the conduct of the two education ministers now subject to ICC warrants.

HAMRAH’s Accountability Work

HAMRAH Network members have also contributed to building accountability mechanisms of their own, in part because formal international processes move so slowly.

Benafsha Yaqoobi of the Rahyab Initiative and Dr Orzala Nemat of Development Research Group — both HAMRAH members — served as judges at the People’s Tribunal on Afghanistan last year, a civil society-led process that documented violations and issued findings on Taliban accountability outside formal judicial channels.

Earlier this month, HAMRAH member Zan Times published the account of a survivor of the Kaaj education centre bombing — a young woman who survived the attack, only to find university doors closed to her by the Taliban in its aftermath. The piece is part of Zan Times’ ongoing reporting from inside Afghanistan, produced by Afghan women journalists working at considerable personal risk.

Testimony of this kind forms the backbone of any future accountability process. 

What Comes Next

The warrants represent progress, but enforcement remains the central challenge. The distance between an unsealed warrant and a defendant appearing before the Court is considerable, and depends heavily on sustained political will from ICC member states.

HAMRAH has consistently argued — including in its joint statement with 95 civil society organisations marking the second anniversary of the CEDAW initiative — that the international community cannot speak about accountability in one forum while normalising the Taliban in another.

HAMRAH Network congratulates every Afghan human rights defender, lawyer, journalist, and survivor whose work contributed to this outcome. We will continue to support our members in building the evidence base that any meaningful accountability process will require.

Related reading
Report on Taliban Madrasas, June 2026
Afghan civil society at the UN Human Rights Council, September 2026
HAMRAH members and their work