Timeline of Taliban edicts and directives against women
Imams are ordered to prepare lists of unmarried women aged 12–45 for Taliban fighters to marry.
Women are ordered to stay at home because soldiers are not trained to respect women.
Co-education is banned and men are prohibited from teaching girls.
Women are banned from playing sports.
Girls are banned from secondary education.
Universities are ordered to enforce gender-segregated classrooms and hijabs for women.
The Ministry of Women’s Affairs is replaced with Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
Working women are ordered to stay home until further notice.
Women are banned from attending and teaching at Kabul University.
Women are banned from appearing on television dramas.
Women are banned from travelling long-distances (78 km) without a mahram (male relative escort).
Taxi drivers are banned from transporting women passengers without a hijab.
Women are banned from entering health centres without a mahram.
The strict enforcement of gender segregation is ordered in all offices.
The start of school year is postponed for girls beyond 6th grade.
Women are banned from travelling abroad without a mahram and without a legitimate reason.
Different days are established for men and women to visit parks.
Taliban issue verbal order to stop issuing driving licences to women.
A decree orders women to appear in public in “proper hijab”, preferably the burqa, although the “first and best option” is to not leave home.
Female TV presenters on air are ordered to cover their faces.
Women employees of the Ministry of Finance are directed to send a male relative to take their jobs if they want to be paid their salaries.
Women are barred from taking university entrance exams for subjects deemed “too difficult”, including agriculture, mining, civil engineering, veterinary sciences and journalism.
Women and girls are banned from parks, public bathhouses and gyms.
Women are banned from private and public universities.
All local and international NGOs in Afghanistan are ordered to stop employing women or face have their operating licences revoked.
Afghan girls are banned from taking university entrance exams.
Thousands of divorce cases granted during the Afghan Republic are declared invalid.
A protest in favour of women’s education in Kabul is “corralled”.
Afghan women are banned from working for UN entities.
Female doctors are banned from registering for the exit exam.
International NGOs are banned from implementing community-based education activities.
Women’s beauty salons are ordered to close within one month.
The Ministry of Public Health introduced a directive banning services related to mental health, psychosocial support, public awareness, women-friendly health centres or changing social behaviour.
NGOs are banned from working on projects related to awareness-raising, conflict resolution, advocacy and peacebuilding.
Dozens of women are arrested for failing to observe its strict dress code, which requires women to wear head-to-toe coverings, including over their faces.
A Taliban court in Kabul sentences Manizha Sediqi, a women’s rights activist, to two years in prison.
Taliban’s Supreme Leader orders a salary cap for female government employees (of 5,000 afghanis monthly).
The “Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” is introduced, banning women’s voices in public and conferring broad powers to Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice inspectors. Read statements by UN Women, OHCHR and the UN Special Representative to Afghanistan.