Five Years On: The Fight for Women’s and Girls’ Human Rights Under Taliban Rule

Five years after the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, women and girls face systemic exclusion from public life, including prohibitions on education, bans on travel without a male chaperone, and severe restrictions on employment.

On September 24, the Ann F. Kaplan Women’s Initiative at the Institute of Global Politics (IGP) brought together Afghan leaders and international human rights experts to discuss the erosion of women’s and girls’ rights under Taliban rule—and what the international community can do to advance accountability and support Afghan-led efforts for change.

“The human rights situation as a whole is not only deteriorating, it’s becoming institutionalized,” said Richard Bennett, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan. “What began as individual orders, restrictions, decrees, edicts have become embedded in the country’s system of government,” he said, adding that the measures had grown increasingly severe since the Taliban resumed power in 2021.

The discussion at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs came during the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly and featured Bennett alongside Jennifer Klein, former assistant to the president and director of the White House Gender Policy Council and director of the Ann F. Kaplan Women’s Initiative; Roya Mahboob, tech entrepreneur and founder of Afghanistan’s first all-girls robotics team; and Ayda Hydapour, a former member of the team who went on to study computer science at Virginia Tech. Rachel Vogelstein, former special assistant to the president and deputy director of the White House Gender Policy Council and director of the Ann F. Kaplan Women’s Initiative, moderated the panel.

The event opened with an excerpt from Rule Breakers, a film that documents the Afghan Dreamers, the robotics team Mahboob founded in 2017, which went on to compete in international competitions and became a symbol of the promise of Afghan girls’ education before the Taliban’s return.

Mahboob, Afghanistan’s first female tech CEO and entrepreneur, said technology had transformed her own understanding of what was possible when she first gained access to a computer as a young woman in Afghanistan. In 2013, she founded Digital Citizen Fund, a nonprofit that seeks to improve technological and financial literacy for women and children in Afghanistan and other developing countries.

Mahboob’s robotics team initially faced opposition from participants’ families and religious figures, as well as practical obstacles including limited access to equipment and technical expertise. “Many families didn’t understand why their daughters should be part of a robotics team, they see that as something that’s for boys to do,” Mahboob said, adding that some parents didn’t want their girls traveling alone or competing against boys, which was seen as a cultural taboo. Despite the social barriers, the team eventually competed internationally and won an award for “courageous achievement.”

Mahboob said the experience changed how some Afghan families viewed the possibilities for their daughters, demonstrating what they could accomplish when given access to education and technology.

“There was a shift happening in a society that had ignored women’s ability in science and technology for many years,” she said. “Afghans were finally seeing what is possible. Families were seeing, ‘Okay, my daughters can also be engineers. They can also build things or become scientists.’”

The Taliban’s return in 2021 reversed much of the progress made on women’s and girls’ rights in the preceding two decades. More than 150 laws and decrees now restrict their rights and effectively remove women from public life. Girls are not allowed to attend school past age 12 and are banned from higher education.

Through her work with Digital Citizen Fund, Mahboob had opened 13 technology centers in schools across Afghanistan. All have had to close since the Taliban’s takeover.

Hydapour, who now works as a software engineer, spoke about how consequential education is for Afghan women and girls because it shapes their ability to determine their own futures.

“It’s way more than just going to classrooms or even earning a degree,” she said of education. “It’s really a part of our identity, a part of our independence, a part of our freedom, and the lives that we can build for ourselves without a man in that story.”

She said she was troubled by the denial of educational opportunities for girls who had once imagined becoming doctors, engineers, and scientists. “All those dreams, all those hopes, they disappeared overnight,” she said.

The panel’s discussion later focused on what governments could do beyond condemning the Taliban.

Klein urged the United States to support international efforts to establish gender apartheid as a crime against humanity while continuing to pursue accountability under existing international law. She also advocated for targeted sanctions and visa restrictions against Taliban officials responsible for the repression of women and girls, alongside direct support for Afghan women-led organizations, educators, journalists, and human rights defenders.

She cautioned that such measures should be narrowly targeted so that they did not further harm the Afghan population. The country is currently facing a humanitarian crisis in part due to foreign aid cuts, with more than 3.7 million children at risk of malnutrition.

Bennett asserted that international condemnation of the Taliban’s restrictions on women and girls is not enough. “After five years, the Taliban has realized that unless condemnation is matched by action, it has no effect,” he said. When governments announce “red lines” without imposing consequences when they are crossed, he warned, the message is that violations are acceptable. Bennett pointed to several avenues for accountability, including an investigation of Afghanistan by the International Criminal Court, which also issued arrest warrants in 2025 for two top Taliban leaders for the crime of gender prosecution, and an independent UN mechanism that can develop case files for potential prosecutions.

As the event concluded, Bennett urged the audience to keep Afghanistan visible internationally. Mahboob suggested practical ways to support Afghan women and girls, including scholarships, mentoring, and assistance with internet access for students pursuing online education.

“Even helping just one person,” she said, “is making a difference.”