On 13 August 2026, the “International Experts’ Declaration on Gender Apartheid and Its Destructive Consequences” was launched during an online event attended by experts in international law, women’s rights defenders, and Afghan figures. The Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies (AISS) was among the co-sponsors of the event.

The Declaration was developed following 18 months of consultation with experts and women’s rights defenders from Afghanistan and other countries and calls for the recognition of and accountability for gender apartheid. The Persian and Pashto translations of the Declaration were also prepared by the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies.

Dr. Davood Moradian, Director General of AISS, said in his remarks that the Taliban’s treatment of women has become systematic. He pointed to the involvement of male family members in controlling women and the imposition of financial penalties on families as examples of mechanisms used by the Taliban to impose restrictions on women.

He also recalled that AISS was among the early institutions to raise the concept of **gender apartheid in relation to Taliban policies during the first years after the group’s return to power. In July 2022, AISS organized an event at the University of Sussex titled Taliban Gender Apartheid: From Condemnation to Accountability,” at a time when the concept had yet to gain the level of legal and academic attention it receives today.

The event stressed that the Taliban’s policies against women are not a collection of isolated restrictions, but part of an organized and systematic system designed to exclude women from public and social life. Addressing this system requires legal accountability and resistance to the normalization of the Taliban.

The Experts’ Declaration on Gender Apartheid calls for the development and use of international law to end this system, hold those responsible accountable, and strengthen the legal tools available to Afghan women and human rights defenders. It also calls for the explicit codification of gender apartheid within international law and for resisting any normalization of systems based on the organized exclusion of women.