ICC unseals warrants for four Taliban leaders over the exclusion of women from school

International Criminal Court judges on Monday unsealed arrest warrants for four Taliban leaders, accusing them of gender persecution as a crime against humanity. The names are Haibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader; Abdul Hakim Haqqani, the chief justice; Habibullah Agha, the education minister; and Neda Mohammad Nadim, the higher education minister. Prosecutors had sought the warrants under article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute. None of the four is in custody. Afghanistan is not a state party, and the court has no police of its own.

Two of the warrants are not new in substance. The existence of the warrants for Akhundzada and Haqqani was announced in July 2025. Their text stayed sealed. The warrants for Agha and Nadim were issued in secret in September 2025 and had not been disclosed at all. Monday's ruling published all four, in redacted form. Judges said publication could help prevent further crimes, inform victims and encourage states to cooperate.

The dates on the charge

The court said there are reasonable grounds to believe the four are criminally responsible for ordering, inducing or soliciting persecution. The period runs from 15 August 2021, the day the Taliban took Kabul, until at least 20 January 2025. Judges found a policy of serious violations of fundamental rights, linked to murder, imprisonment, torture, rape and enforced disappearance. Some rules applied to everyone. Girls and women were targeted because of their gender. Decrees cut education, privacy, family life, movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion.

Agha is a former Kandahar court official, appointed education minister in September 2022. The warrant links him to the loss of schooling for girls. Nadim is a former provincial governor, appointed higher education minister the following month. His warrant is tied to the closure of universities and institutes to women. The split matters. One warrant tracks the school ban. The other tracks the ban on higher study. Both sit under the same crime against humanity.

What an unsealing does

An arrest warrant from The Hague does not move a suspect. It obliges the 125 states parties to arrest the named person if he enters their territory, and it makes travel, banking and official contact harder for governments that take the court seriously. Taliban leaders have travelled in the region since 2021, including to meetings in Qatar, Russia, China and Central Asia. A public warrant changes the legal risk of the next trip, even if no host state acts.

The July 2025 announcement already told Akhundzada and Haqqani that warrants existed. What Monday added is the text, the redactions, and the two education ministers. Victims' lawyers can now point to a public judicial finding that the school and university bans are charged as persecution, not only as policy. The finding is a reasonable-grounds standard, which is the court's threshold for a warrant, not a conviction.

The limit of the file

The charged window stops at 20 January 2025 in the material the court released. Edicts on dress, movement and work have continued past that date. Monday's publication does not extend the charge sheet by itself. It also does not name field commanders. The four warrants sit at the top of the administration: the leader, the chief justice, and the two ministers who ran the school and university systems after September and October 2022.

The practical consequence this week is documentary. States that receive a Taliban delegation now have a public ICC file on the education ministers as well as on the leader and the chief justice. Whether any airport acts on it is a separate decision. The court has said publication was meant to encourage that cooperation.