ATHENS, Greece — A new penal code issued by decree in Afghanistan sets harsher punishments for the mistreatment of animals than for domestic violence against women and solidifies into law inequality based on gender and social status.
The decree, which was signed by Afghanistan’s Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada in January, “defines several crimes and punishments that contravene Afghanistan’s international legal obligations,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said Thursday in remarks to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
He urged Afghan authorities to rescind the decree.
Made up of 119 articles, the 60-page Decree No. 12 lays out penalties for women who visit their relatives without their husband’s permission, and allows husbands and the heads of households to determine and mete out punishment in their own homes.
“It provides for the use of corporal punishment for numerous offenses, including in the home, legitimizing violence against women and children,” Turk said. “And it criminalizes criticism of the de facto leadership and their policies, in violation of freedom of expression and assembly.”
The decree states that a man who beats his wife severely enough to cause a visible cut, wound or bruise faces 15 days in prison — if his wife can prove her case to a judge. But a woman who goes to her father’s house and stays there without her husband’s permission is punished by three months in prison, as are her relatives if they do not return her to her husband.
The decree “formally removes equality between men and women before the law,” U.N. Women Special Representative in Afghanistan Susan Ferguson said in a statement released Wednesday. “It places husbands in a position of authority over their wives and limits women’s ability to seek protection or justice.”
Penalties are harsher for mistreating animals than women. Five months in prison is the punishment for anyone having animals or birds fight. Animal and bird fighting, particularly cockfights and fights between partridges, is a popular pastime in Afghanistan but was banned after the Taliban seized power in 2021.
Afghan authorities have often issued laws laying out various prohibitions, including bans on education for girls beyond primary school, on women working in most jobs, and mandates on how women should dress and behave. But the decree is the first full penal code issued by the government.
The new penal code also lays out different treatment for the same crime depending on social class, ranging from simple warnings for clerics to corporal punishment for those deemed to be at the lowest social rungs.
Scholars and “high-ranking people” face a warning from a judge; tribal leaders and businessmen receive a warning and a court summons; “average people of society” face imprisonment; and “the lower classes” are subject to physical beatings. If an offender is sentenced to a maximum 39 lashes, they must be to “different parts of the body,” the decree states.
However, the differing treatment does not apply in murder cases, where anyone found guilty faces the death penalty. The other capital offense is insulting the Prophet Muhammad, although in that case the death penalty can be converted to six years’ imprisonment if the offender repents.
Speaking in Geneva, Turk called on Afghan authorities to “reverse their course on excluding half the population. Women and girls are the present and the future, and the country cannot thrive without them.”
