ICC unseals arrest warrants for four Taliban leaders on gender persecution

Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court on Monday unsealed four arrest warrants in the Afghanistan situation, naming Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada, Supreme Court chief Abdul Hakim Haqqani, education minister Habibullah Agha and higher education minister Neda Mohammad Nadim.

The court said the warrants were issued on 8 July 2025 and 9 September 2025. The existence of the first two had been made public on 8 July 2025. Their contents stayed sealed until Monday's decision. The warrants for Agha and Nadim had not been disclosed at all.

Judges found reasonable grounds to believe the four ordered, induced or solicited the crime against humanity of persecution under article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute. The alleged persecution is on gender grounds against girls, women and other persons who do not conform with Taliban policy on gender, gender identity or expression. It is also on political grounds against people the Taliban treat as allies of girls and women.

The chamber placed the conduct on the territory of Afghanistan from the Taliban's seizure of power on 15 August 2021 until at least 20 January 2025. It said the suspects, acting for the Taliban, carried out a governmental policy that produced severe violations of fundamental rights, in connection with murder, imprisonment, torture, rape and enforced disappearance.

The judges said girls and women were targeted by reason of their gender and deprived of rights the chamber listed as education, privacy, family life, movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion. Other people were targeted, the decision said, because expressions of sexuality or gender identity were treated as inconsistent with Taliban policy.

In the same ruling the chamber said the Rome Statute's definition of gender requires a reading that goes beyond a purely biological conception of sex. That sentence is now part of the public record of the Afghanistan warrants.

Agha is a former Kandahar court official who became education minister in September 2022. Nadim, a former provincial governor, became higher education minister the following month. The education portfolio is the part of the record that ties the later warrants to the closure of secondary schooling for girls and the removal of women from universities. The earlier warrants against Akhundzada and Haqqani sit at the top of the same policy chain.

The court has no police force. Afghanistan is not a state party that will execute these warrants, and the Taliban control the territory where the suspects live and work. An unsealed warrant still has a legal effect outside Afghanistan. States parties are obliged to arrest a suspect who enters their territory. A warrant also blocks ordinary diplomatic travel and gives banks and immigration services a name to screen.

Former prosecutor Karim Khan said in January 2025, when he applied for the first two warrants, that Afghan women and girls and LGBT people were facing ongoing persecution by the Taliban. Monday's decision does not add a new application. It publishes warrants the court had already issued and had kept wholly or partly out of public view.

The practical gap is enforcement. The chamber said publication could help prevent further crimes, inform victims and encourage cooperation. None of those effects depends on an arrest this week. What changes on Monday is that the names, the article, the dates and the gender finding are no longer held in a sealed file.

The Afghanistan investigation has moved in stages since the court's judges authorised it. The July 2025 disclosure told the public that Akhundzada and Haqqani were wanted. It did not tell the public what the warrants said, and it did not name the two ministers who run the school and university bans. Monday closes that gap in the public record. It does not close the gap between a warrant and a cell in The Hague.