Introduction
This report is based on the information and evidence gathered from primary sources inside Afghanistan, including direct interviews with victims, survivors, eyewitnesses, and informed local actors. It examines the state of human rights in Afghanistan in 2025. The report covers civil and political rights, women’s rights, and the condition of vulnerable ethnic and religious groups in Afghanistan in 2025, identifying trends and patterns of violations as well as referencing verbal or written decrees by the De-facto authorities (DFA) impacting the human rights situation in this period.
Based on Rawadari’s findings, major violations of civil and political rights as well as the rights of women and ethnic and religious minorities have continued and intensified in 2025. The restrictions have additionally taken on a more systematic and organized character partly due to the implementation of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (PVPV) law, instated in August 2024. Targeted and extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, torture, and other cruel and degrading treatment have increased significantly compared to 2024. The findings also indicate that former government employees, journalists, human rights defenders, and individuals accused of cooperating with opposition groups continue to be targeted for extrajudicial killings, detention, enforced disappearance, and other retaliatory actions, without any significant, concrete steps from the DFA to end these violations.
The human rights situation of women has further deteriorated in 2025 owing to increased local restrictions and implementation of the PVPV law. This deterioration is driven by the continued denial of access to education, employment, freedom of movement, and justice, along with more hard-line enforcement of restrictions by the DFA. With the enforcement of the PVPV law, discrimination, restrictions, and social control over women have become more organized and far-reaching, extending into many more aspects of their personal and social lives. As confirmed by the People’s Tribunal for Women of Afghanistan, the violations of women’s rights amount to gender persecution as defined under Article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
At the meantime, the Taliban courts, during this reporting period, have implemented or upheld a wide range of corporal punishments, including flogging and other forms of degrading punishment. These practices clearly conflict with fundamental principles prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
Ethnic and religious minorities in Afghanistan have faced discrimination in access to employment and economic opportunities, public resources and services, as well as restrictions on the freedom to practice their religious rituals.
The absence of independent monitoring mechanisms such as independent human rights bodies or independent judiciary inside the country, along with the continued impunity of perpetrators of human rights violations, has led to the persistence and expansion of various forms of abuse, while denying access to justice to victims’ and survivors. We call for immediate and concrete action by the DFA, international community, the United Nations (UN), and other relevant stakeholders to protect the fundamental rights of the people of Afghanistan.
Methodology
Rawadari has engaged in collecting information and documenting cases of human rights violations in Afghanistan throughout 2025. Our monitoring team have conducted interviews with victims & their family members, eyewitnesses, human rights defenders, activists, journalists, school teachers, university professors, government employees, defence lawyers, local elders, health sector workers, and relevant national and international organizations in 30 provinces of the country. The data and evidence, after analysis and verification, has been compiled it in the form of monthly reports and recorded and stored in a secure database.
The process of collecting information, documents, and evidence related to human rights violations has been carried out by Rawadari’s local monitors under the direct supervision of our research and documentation team. In addition to interviews with sources, our team on the ground has collected supplementary evidence such as official correspondence, judicial documents, photographs, audio files, hospital and clinic records and reports and information published by the DFA ministries and institutions. Furthermore, to ensure the credibility, accuracy, and quality of the information, Rawadari’s research team has provided specialized training and guidance to local monitors throughout the year.
The findings of this report include verified information obtained directly from primary sources. There were reported cases where due to security limitations and access challenges, it was not possible to credibly verify information or obtain sufficient evidence. Such cases have been excluded from this report.
This report compares the findings of 2025 with numbers of violations in 2023 and 2024 as documented by Rawadari. The report aims to present a clear, comparative picture of prominent patterns of human rights violations, the type and nature of violations, as well as the characteristics of victims and targeted groups.
Given the risks of human rights documentation under the DFA, the limitations imposed on access to information, the censorship and restrictions imposed on local media and security concerns of survivors and their families, it is hard to verify every reported case. Thus, the number of violations presented in this report might be lower than the number of actual cases.
The first section of the report is dedicated to assessing the situation of civil and political rights, and subsequent sections examine the human rights situation of women and vulnerable ethnic and religious groups. Since Rawadari has already published the human rights situation report for the first half of 2025, the examples and cases described in various sections of this report primarily include the examples recorded in the second half of the year.
Limitations on Access to Information
Our findings indicate that the DFA in Afghanistan have continued to adopt and implement more restrictive measures on access to information in 2025. The General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI), Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention Vice (MPVPV), and the Ministry of Information and Culture (MoIC) are the three entities that primarily monitor the activities of media as well as ordinary citizens who are social media users for compliance with restrictions and censorship imposed by the DFA. Theses entities, in numerous cases, have exerted pressure, threats, detention, torture, and mistreatment against those who have published information relating to human rights violations.
Furthermore, human rights defenders, journalists, and local and national media outlets are not permitted to collect or publish information about security incidents, criticism of the de-facto authorities and cases of human rights violations without written permission from the MoIC and its provincial departments. As documented by Rawadari throughout 2025, the DFA have arrested and tortured human rights defenders and journalists who acted in defiance of this directive, charging them with “espionage for foreigners” or “propaganda against the system.” This situation has caused widespread self-censorship and underreporting of human rights violations in the country. It has also had a direct impact on the personal freedom and security of human rights defenders and journalists to the extent that a number of local journalists were compelled to leave their places of residence and relocate to other provinces in 2025.
Additionally, the DFA continue to threaten and exert pressure on victims and their family members, eyewitnesses, and other informed local sources to hide and obscure evidence of human rights violations. The Taliban have directly threatened family members and relatives of victims regarding major human rights violation incidents, including torture, enforced disappearance, and targeted and extrajudicial killings, to prevent from providing any information in this regard to media or human rights organizations. There are also reports that in some cases related to extrajudicial and suspicious killings, the Taliban have told victims’ families to share false and inaccurate testimonies with the media to conceal the truth.
Our findings indicate that the Taliban obtain written commitments from all prisoners and detainees, and especially individuals who have been subjected to torture or other forms of mistreatment during detention, not to talk to any person or entity about their experiences or observations in detention centres. This has severely limited access to direct and open testimonies and indicates the risk of retaliatory actions against these individuals in case they testify about their experiences. Furthermore, there is no regular, independent monitoring of all places of detention in Afghanistan. Additionally, officials and employees at places of detention are strictly prohibited from providing any information to media and human rights organizations.
All DFA government institutions are prohibited from sharing information with media or other individuals without prior permission from competent authorities. Reports indicate that in some parts of the country, including the south-western region, the government employees are prohibited from the use of smartphones with cameras while in the office. Government employees in this region are also not allowed to conduct interviews or have any cooperation with the Afghan media in exile.
In this regard, the Taliban’s Department of Information and Culture in two provinces, Parwan and Nangarhar, has warned media and local journalists that in case of any cooperation with media operating outside the country they will be arrested and imprisoned by the GDI.
In addition to these restrictions, the implementation of the “PVPV” law has also led to the further expansion of fear among citizens and media and has created serious obstacles to freedom of expression. This law prevents conversation between women and men who are not related to them, it bans the broadcast of women’s voice on media as well as broadcasting of images of “living beings”. The law further bans the media from broadcasting content contradictory to de-facto laws and regulations or content leading to “humiliation or insult to Muslims”. While not all these restrictions are enforced in full, they have created an environment of constant anxiety and fear in local media and journalists and have allowed authorities to further restrict and harass all national and local media operating inside Afghanistan. The nationwide internet service blackout in September 2025, which was later rescinded, was also carried out with the deliberate aim of imposing sweeping restrictions on the free flow of information.
The Taliban have systematically restricted access to information and have prevented the exposure of human rights violations in 2025, a situation that has limited victims’ access to justice and accountability mechanisms and has also led to widespread self-censorship and reluctance to provide information. The findings of this report thus need to be contextualized within this broader environment of severe restrictions on access to information that severely impact human rights documentation.
