No Exit- Legal Persecution and the Lived Situation of Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LBTI) Women under Taliban Rule in Afghanistan (2025 to 2026)

Introduction

This report is based on information and evidence obtained from primary sources, including direct interviews with survivors and analysis of the official legislative texts issued by the Taliban. It examines the situation of lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LBTI) women in Afghanistan from January 2025 to June 2026. Identity based prosecution, state and family violence, deprivation of education and employment, forced marriage, and the closure of migration pathways are among the principal subjects addressed.

The information and evidence gathered show that LBTI individuals in Afghanistan do not face a situation of restricted rights. They occupy a position of total legal exposure, in which their identities exist within the governing legal order exclusively as criminal offenses, the home has been converted into a site of confinement, economic independence has been removed by operation of law, and the last remaining international routes to safety were closed during this same reporting period.

The findings of this report show that the Taliban has constructed an integrated four layer legal system that criminalizes LBTI identities and, at the same time, removes every mechanism of survival and escape. The Penal Code of Courts, issued in March 2026, criminalizes same sex conduct and gender non conformity with penalties ranging from flogging to imprisonment and execution. The Law on the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice transfers that criminalization from the courts into ordinary public life and grants muhtasibin the authority to detain and punish without any judicial process. The Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses gives forced marriage legal validity and makes exit from it practically impossible. The decrees on women’s education and employment remove knowledge, income and freedom of movement, that is, the very instruments without which survival or escape is not possible. These four instruments do not operate in isolation from one another, and their combined effect is a system in which, for the population examined in this report, no exit remains.

The thirty individuals interviewed for this research come from fourteen provinces of the country and fall into three groups: twenty one transgender women, five intersex individuals who concurrently identify as transgender women, and four lesbian women. They reported arbitrary arrest and detention without charge, systematic torture in custody, rape by Taliban forces, forced marriage with no lawful avenue of exit, family violence including attempted honor killing, destitution imposed through the legal prohibition on employment, and the progressive closure of internal and external migration pathways. Their accounts show that these violations are not isolated incidents, nor the product of local enforcement discretion, but the direct and foreseeable output of this same legal framework.

A further finding of this report is that state persecution and family violence are not two parallel and independent systems, but structures that reinforce one another. In several documented cases, the event that initiated Taliban detention was a report made by a family member or by residents of the locality. In other cases, detention and public labelling by the Taliban triggered or intensified the family violence that followed release. The family environment, which should serve as a place of refuge, has thereby been turned into a source of danger.

The reporting period coincides with the consolidation of Taliban governance and with a shift in international policy. The cancellation of resettlement programs for Afghan nationals in late 2025, together with the large scale deportation of undocumented Afghans from neighbouring countries, has removed the final practical channel through which individuals at risk were able to reach safety, and has made the existing system of control total. This report is submitted in the context of the ongoing assessment of Afghanistan by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). It is expected that the findings and recommendations it contains will receive the attention of the United Nations, states, donor institutions and human rights organizations, and that practical measures will be adopted and implemented to protect the fundamental rights of this population.

Research Methodology

This research was conducted between January 2025 and June 2026 and employs a qualitative human rights design that brings together two distinct but interrelated bodies of evidence within a single framework: legal analysis of the Taliban’s legislative texts, and the direct accounts of individuals. The basis for this choice is that the severity of the situation facing LBTI individuals can be assessed accurately only when the legal architecture of persecution and its human consequences are read together.

During this period, thirty semi structured interviews were conducted with individuals who self identify as lesbian, bisexual, transgender or intersex. Interviewees were selected through purposive sampling, with priority given to geographic diversity across provinces and to the representation of all three groups. Initial contact was established exclusively through trusted intermediary networks that already had relationships with LBTI individuals inside Afghanistan and in Pakistan. Recruitment through open or public channels was not pursued, as it would have created unacceptable security risks for those concerned.

Interviews were conducted individually, in Dari and in some cases in Pashto, under conditions of strict confidentiality. Questions were open ended and organized around the thematic categories of violation examined in the report, so that each person could describe their experience in their own words. Where security concerns or the severity of psychological harm required it, interviews were conducted across several sessions or shortened at the person’s own request. The interpreters involved in this process were experienced in working with LBTI individuals in human rights settings and were bound by the same confidentiality obligations as the research team.

The legal analysis is based on the official Arabic and Dari texts of the four instruments as published in the Taliban’s Official Gazette, and all translations of cited provisions were produced and verified by the research team against the original texts. The jurisprudential sources referenced in the footnotes of these instruments were also consulted in the original language, in order to establish the doctrinal context in which their provisions operate.

The interview data was analyzed using thematic analysis, beginning with open coding without any predetermined categorization, followed by the grouping of codes into broader themes, which produced the three principal categories of state and systematic violence, family violence, and social and economic violence. Each account was further assessed for internal consistency and, wherever possible, compared against supporting evidence including medical records, photographs, and the accounts of other interviewees describing the same locations, time periods or perpetrating actors. Where independent verification was not possible, an account was assessed on the basis of its internal coherence, the specificity of its detail, and its consistency with the patterns documented across the wider body of accounts.

The protection of interviewees was treated throughout as the paramount ethical obligation, taking precedence over any methodological preference. All individuals appear in this report solely under aliases assigned by the research team, bearing no relationship to their actual names. No identifying information, including precise location, occupation or family composition, has been included where it could contribute to identification, and details carrying a risk of identification have been generalized to the minimum degree necessary without diminishing the evidentiary value of the account. Informed consent was obtained before every interview, and where a written consent form would itself have constituted a dangerous record, verbal consent was obtained and documented by the researcher.

Limitations on Access to Information

The most significant limitation of this research is access. The systematic criminalization of LBTI identities under the legal framework examined here means that the population studied is, by definition, a hidden population. Its members cannot organize openly, cannot be reached through public channels, and cannot disclose their identities to documenting organizations without risk to their lives.

The thirty people interviewed for this report are, in most cases, individuals who had already experienced severe violations and subsequently made contact with intermediary networks. This produces a systematic selection effect, meaning that the accounts documented here probably reflect the more severe end of the spectrum of experiences facing LBTI individuals in Afghanistan, and that the actual scope of violations across the wider population is almost certainly greater than this report has been able to document.

Geographic representation is a further constraint. Interviewees are concentrated in urban and peri urban areas, particularly Kabul, Mazar e Sharif and Jalalabad. LBTI individuals living in rural areas, who face geographic isolation, reduced access to support networks and more intensive community surveillance, are significantly underrepresented in this research, and their experience probably constitutes a substantial part of the overall picture that this report does not reflect.

The criminalization of support networks also restricts the documentation process directly. Under Paragraph 7 of Article 22 of the Law on the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, providing any space or assistance to persons deemed to be engaging in prohibited conduct is itself a criminal offence. This provision means that any individual or organization inside Afghanistan that assists or cooperates with LBTI persons is exposed to direct legal risk, a situation that has made contact with survivors, the recording of their accounts, and the follow up of individual cases considerably more difficult and more dangerous.

In addition, the Penal Code of Courts, one of the four instruments analyzed in this report, was issued in March 2026, during the final months of the research period. Its full operational consequences had not yet materialized at the time of the last interviews, and the analysis of this instrument therefore rests on its textual provisions and their relationship to earlier enforcement patterns, rather than on a complete record of its application.

Finally, the Taliban authorities were not approached for a response to the findings presented here, as doing so was assessed as posing an unacceptable risk to interviewees and to intermediary networks. Taking these limitations together, the findings of this report may not reflect the full scope of human rights violations against LBTI individuals during this period.