International Women’s Day is often framed as celebration. In reality, March 8 is a reminder that rights are never permanently secured. They are defended across generations, and they can be dismantled decree by decree.
In 2026, no country illustrates this more starkly than Afghanistan.
Afghanistan remains the only state in the world where girls are formally banned from secondary education nationwide and women are systematically excluded from universities, most public employment, and civic life by state decree. This is not gradual regression. It is structured erasure.
Since August 2021, Afghan authorities have constructed a system in which gender determines access to education, work, mobility, and voice. Secondary schools remain closed to girls. Universities are barred to women. Women have been removed from most public-sector positions. Women-led civil society organizations have been curtailed. UNESCO confirms that Afghanistan stands alone globally in enforcing a nationwide ban on girls’ secondary education. UNDP continues to document the collapse of female labor participation alongside severe economic contraction and rising household vulnerability.
Taken together, these measures do more than restrict opportunity. They reorganize society around exclusion. They redefine citizenship itself.
It is for this reason that the term “gender apartheid” has moved from advocacy language into structured legal analysis. In 2023, the People’s Tribunal on Gender Apartheid convened in The Hague to examine Afghanistan’s policies. Dr. Rashida Manjoo, former UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, served as Chief Judge and delivered the Tribunal’s verdict in December 2025. The Tribunal determined that the Taliban’s treatment of women constitutes systematic, intentional, and state-imposed gender-based persecution amounting to crimes against humanity. It further found that the situation meets the structural characteristics of an apartheid-like regime marked by institutionalised segregation and domination, while acknowledging that “gender apartheid” is not yet codified as a distinct crime under existing international law. For that reason, it cannot currently be prosecuted under that label without legal development.
The Tribunal, therefore called for international law to be clarified or amended to explicitly recognize gender apartheid and urged the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, States, and civil society to act decisively. Crucially, it emphasized that Afghan women must be recognized not merely as victims, but as rights-holders and leaders in accountability processes.
The legal foundation already exists in part. Article 7 of the Rome Statute defines persecution on gender grounds, when widespread or systematic, as a crime against humanity and describes apartheid as institutionalised domination maintained over a group. Afghanistan is a State Party to the Rome Statute. The framework is there. The evidence of systematic deprivation is visible. The question is whether interpretation will rise to meet reality.
March 8 is also a reminder that Afghan women have long carried the torch of reform and rights from within their own society and have passed it forward across generations. Queen Soraya Tarzi championed girls’ education in the 1920s, insisting that national progress required women’s literacy and participation. Decades later, Dr. Anahita Ratebzad, one of Afghanistan’s first female physicians and a leading women’s rights reformist and activist, publicly argued that women’s equal access to education, employment, and health services was essential to national development. In a 1978 article in the New Kabul Times, she wrote that such rights were not privileges but necessities for building a healthy and modern society, a reminder that demands for equality were articulated by Afghan women long before contemporary debates. After 2001, Dr. Sima Samar worked to embed women’s rights within national institutions and accountability frameworks.
That torch did not extinguish in 2021. It shifted hands. Following the recent decrees, activists such as Tamana Zaryab Paryani protested publicly against the bans despite detention and intimidation. Beyond the visible names, countless women inside Afghanistan and across the diaspora have chosen not to retreat into silence. Teachers holding underground classes, students continuing their studies in secrecy, lawyers documenting abuses, scientists and writers speaking from exile, many could choose safety, privacy, or distance. Instead, they use whatever platform or privilege they possess to insist that exclusion will not define their future.
The struggle has never belonged to one generation alone. It advances each time a woman decides that silence is not an option.
The struggle for women’s rights in Afghanistan has never been imported. It has been led, articulated, and defended by Afghan women themselves. The present system of exclusion is not tradition; it is a rupture from a century of reform driven from within.
Education bans dismantle generational knowledge continuity. University prohibitions remove women from scientific and professional life. Employment exclusion weakens economic resilience and entrenches dependency. When half the population is systematically erased from public life, governance itself is transformed. Institutions narrow. Pluralism contracts.
International Women’s Day in 2026 is therefore not only commemorative. It is diagnostic.
When exclusion becomes law and domination becomes policy, international law is tested. The question is not whether Afghan women will continue to resist, they have done so for generations. The question is whether the global legal order will recognize the structure of their exclusion with the clarity it demands. When the exclusion of women becomes state policy, it does not only violate rights; it unravels the legal order, weakens national institutions, and fractures the continuity of knowledge itself.
Dr. Amna Mehmood is a senior scientist and science educator whose work focuses on sustaining STEM education and scientific identity among Afghan women under conditions of educational exclusion. Dr. Amna Mehmood is a molecular biologist and senior scientist at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.
