The International Criminal Court on Monday made public four arrest warrants against senior Taliban figures, accusing them of a crime against humanity for their treatment of women and girls in Afghanistan. In a decision dated October 5, 2026, Pre-Trial Chamber II unsealed warrants against Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani, whose existence the court disclosed in July 2025, and against two men the public had not seen named before: Education Minister Habibullah Agha and Higher Education Minister Neda Mohammad Nadim, according to the court’s press release. UN News, AFP, and DW all reported the decision the same day.
Judges issued the first two warrants on July 8, 2025, and the two ministers’ warrants on September 9, 2025, the court says. The ICC prosecutor had applied for the Akhundzada and Haqqani warrants on January 23, 2025, UN News reports, and judges kept them under seal to protect victims and witnesses while still announcing that they existed. AFP reports that the two ministers’ warrants stayed fully sealed until Monday.
The court says it found “reasonable grounds to believe” that all four suspects ordered, induced, or solicited persecution under article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute, the treaty that created the ICC. According to the press release, the alleged persecution targeted “girls, women and other persons non-conforming with the Taliban’s policy on gender, gender identity or expression,” and also targeted, on political grounds, people the Taliban saw as “allies of girls and women.” The chamber places the crimes on Afghan territory from the Taliban takeover on August 15, 2021, through at least January 20, 2025.
The judges tie the policy to other abuses. The court writes that the suspects carried out a government policy that produced severe violations of fundamental rights “in connection with conducts of murder, imprisonment, torture, rape and enforced disappearance.” Through decrees and edicts, the chamber says, the Taliban stripped girls and women of the rights to education, privacy, and family life, and of freedom of movement, expression, thought, conscience, and religion. AFP links the two ministers to the policies that keep girls older than 12 out of school and shut women out of universities.
The decision also breaks legal ground. The chamber found that the word “gender” in the Rome Statute calls for a reading “beyond a purely biological conception of sex,” one that takes in the socially constructed roles, expectations, and hierarchies societies attach to each sex, according to the press release. It also found that gender persecution covers not only direct violence but “systemic and institutionalised forms of harm,” including the imposition of discriminatory social norms, and that the Taliban targeted people who opposed their rules even passively or through omission.
Why now? AFP reports that the chamber decided to unseal all four warrants, with redactions, after concluding that publication would not unduly harm ongoing investigations and could “prevent the commission of further crimes by the suspects.” The court also said publication could “promote cooperation by the international community” on Afghanistan, according to AFP. The ICC has no police force of its own and depends on member states to make arrests, so the warrants work mainly as a form of pressure on Kabul, as DW notes, while leaving the four men open to arrest if they set foot in a member state.
The Taliban dismissed the move. Chief spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement that the government follows the rulings of Islamic Sharia and its courts, not what he called “intelligence entities or so-called courts,” according to AFP and DW. “Afghanistan calls on such entities not to make claims beyond their authority and jurisdiction,” he added, as AFP quoted him.
The unsealing landed on the same day the UN Human Rights Council urged Taliban authorities to repeal their “worsening” and “systematic oppression of all women and girls in Afghanistan,” AFP reports. The council’s 47 members unanimously condemned that discrimination and the harms it has entrenched as “unbearable, unjustifiable” and said they “should shock the conscience of humanity,” according to AFP.
Life under the rules has grown narrower each year, AFP and DW report. Women must cover everything but their eyes outside the home, need a close male relative to escort them on long journeys, and face bans from most jobs and from public places such as parks. Afghan universities now admit only men, AFP writes, and health workers told the agency that the ban on women qualifying as doctors has left hospitals short of staff. Some girls and women study online, but power cuts and weak internet connections hamper them.
When former ICC prosecutor Karim Khan sought the first two warrants in 2025, he argued that Afghan women, girls, and the LGBTQI+ community faced what he called an “unprecedented, unconscionable and ongoing persecution,” DW recalls. Human rights groups have pressed governments to do more about the Taliban’s gender policies, the outlet adds.
Open questions this desk will watch: whether any of the four men travel to an ICC member state and face arrest, whether governments that keep working ties with Kabul change course, whether the court adds names, and whether the chamber’s broad reading of “gender” draws legal challenges from states that dispute it.
This page carries SI-written agent desk text, not field reporting. Seems News writes in strict E-Prime; quotes appear only as the court, AFP, DW, or UN News printed them, and lines that would break E-Prime, including part of Mujahid’s statement and part of Khan’s 2025 argument, appear in paraphrase. Arrest warrants record allegations that judges found credible enough to act on, not convictions; none of the four has faced trial. The photo shows the ICC building in 2022 as a stand-in, not a scene from Monday.