Introduction
She was only fifteen years old and had been married for eight months when she died. In Daikundi province in central Afghanistan, the girl had been repeatedly beaten by her husband, a cousin of hers. Each time she ran home, the elders of her village talked her into going back to him. In May 2026, the beatings killed her (Joya, 2026). Her name was never made public. What is known is that she was a child, that she had no legal way out of the marriage, and that her death fell in the same month the Taliban gave child marriage a firmer place in Afghan law than it had ever held.
That law is Decree No. 18, the Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses, issued by the Taliban’s Ministry of Justice in May 2026 (Kumar, 2026). On its surface, the law is about divorce. In practice, it treats the marriage of girls who have not reached adulthood as valid and makes leaving a marriage almost impossible for women and girls. Human rights groups and the United Nations (UN) acknowledge that it does not merely tolerate child marriage. Rather, it writes it into the legal system and legitimises it (Joya, 2026).
This article assesses what Decree No. 18 changes and why that change matters. It begins with the current situation faced by Afghan women and girls, then examines what the new law actually does; both, to girls married as children and to women seeking a divorce. It sets out the international commitments Afghanistan has broken, the poverty and lost schooling that are pushing families to marry off their daughters, and the real cost these marriages carry for the girls who live through them. It ends with what the UN and human rights organisations are now asking the world to do.
The Legal Background Before 2026
Long before this new law, Afghanistan was a hard place to be born a girl. Child marriage was widespread. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN agency for children, estimated that around 28 percent of Afghan women aged between 15 to 49 had been married before the age of 18 (UNICEF, 2021). What is easy to forget is that the country once had laws against marrying children, and those laws have quietly fallen away.
The Civil Code of 1977 set the minimum age of marriage at 16 for girls and 18 for boys. A later law passed in 2009, the Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, went further and criminalised marriages of girls under the age of 15. Enforcement was always weak, and the rules were often broken, yet a legal floor existed. In principle, a family could not marry off a daughter at any age it chose.
Under the Taliban, that floor has been removed. The 2009 law is no longer applied, the Civil Code has been pushed aside, and the country now has no clear minimum age for marriage at all. Eligibility is tied instead to puberty, which can begin as early as nine (Kumar, 2026). This is the heart of the matter. The problem is no longer only that child marriage happens despite the law. It is that the law has stopped standing on the way. Rather than restoring a minimum age, Decree No. 18 builds a fresh set of rules on top of that empty space and treats the marriage of children as an ordinary part of family life.
What Decree No. 18 Changes
The Taliban had once gestured at protection. In December 2021, their supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, issued a decree declaring that no woman could be forced into marriage and that women were not property. Yet that decree pointedly set no minimum age, and the measures that followed have eroded even the little it promised. Girls were barred from secondary school in 2021 and from university in 2022; women were pushed out of most paid work, requiring a male guardian as a condition for travellingl, and a sweeping morality law in 2024 ordered women to cover their faces and forbid their voices from being raised in public. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), the UN’s political office in the country, describes Decree No. 18 as the latest step in this steady erosion of the rights the 2021 Decree had claimed to grant (UNAMA, 2026).
The Code was approved by Akhundzada and entered the official record in May 2026 (UNAMA, 2026). It is framed as a law about separation and divorce, and its first effect is to widen the gap between what a husband and a wife are allowed to do. A man may end a marriage on his own word. A woman cannot. To separate, she must approach the court and clear hurdles a man never faces. She can ask a judge to cancel the marriage only on narrow grounds, for example by showing that her husband has treated her without kindness or is known for bad conduct, and a girl married as a child cannot even begin to do so until she reaches puberty. If she asks for a divorce and her husband refuses, and she cannot bring witnesses to support her, the law says his word stands (Kumar, 2026).
UNAMA describes the Code as placing women in a deeply unequal position, since men can divorce freely while women must use complex and restrictive court routes (UNAMA, 2026). The law also strips away grounds for separation that women used to have. Under the old Civil Code, a wife could ask the court to free her if her husband disappeared for three years or was jailed for five. Reporting by Zahra Joya in the Guardian found that the new Code removes protections of this kind. Therefore, a husband’s long absence or his refusal to support his family is no longer a sufficient reason for divorce (Joya, 2026). The door out of a marriage now opens easily for men and barely at all for women.
The second and more alarming effect concerns children, and it rests on two statutory provisions in particular. The first is Article 5. According to National Public Radio (NPR), which obtained and reviewed the text of the Code, Article 5 grants a child’s legal guardian the authority to arrange the child’s marriage and explicitly recognises such marriages as legally valid. The provision does not establish a minimum age for marriage (Kumar, 2026). The second is Article 7, which treats the silence of a girl who has reached puberty as her agreement to marry. A girl does not have to agree and if she says nothing, the law records that as consent.
UNAMA studied the Code and arrived to a conclusion that cuts to the core of the problem. Because the law lays out how a girl married before puberty may try to separate once she reaches it, the law takes for granted that such marriages already exist and are valid. In the Mission’s words, this implies that child marriage is permitted, and treating a girl’s silence as consent undermines the principle of free and full consent while failing to protect the best interests of the child (UNAMA, 2026). The structure of the law gives the game away; A code would not need a chapter on freeing child brides unless it first acknowledges and accepts the status quo where child brides exist.
The Taliban do not really dispute the substance. Zabihullah Mujahid, the movement’s chief spokesman, dismissed the criticism and stated that objections from those he accused of opposing Islam would be ignored (Kumar, 2026). Moreover, he confirmed that marriages of girls arranged by a father or grandfather before puberty were still treated as valid, and said the new Code was meant to deal with exactly that situation (Kumar, 2026). The government is therefore not claiming the law protects children, but it is openly stating that the marriage of children continues, and that the Code is simply the framework for managing it.
Afghanistan’s Obligations Under International Law
A government can rewrite its own family law. However, it cannot simply rewrite the promises the State has made to the rest of the world, and those promises still bind Afghanistan today. The most important of them, for this question, is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which Afghanistan joined in 2003. Afghanistan accepted it without a single reservation, the first Muslim-majority country to do so (Johnson, 2024). That matters, because Article 16 of CEDAW falls squarely on the point. It says that the engagement and marriage of a child shall have no legal effect, and that states must pass laws fixing a minimum age for marriage (United Nations, 1979). Afghanistan took on that duty in full and without qualification, and Decree No. 18 runs directly against it.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which Afghanistan ratified in 1994, points the same way. It defines a child as anyone under the age of 18 and requires states to shield children from violence and from customs that harm their health (United Nations, 1989). Here Afghanistan did attach a reservation, declining to be bound by anything it judged contrary to Islamic law (United Nations Treaty Collection, n.d.). That sounds like an escape route, but in law it is a weak one. The CRC itself says that a reservation incompatible with the object and purpose of the Convention is not permitted (United Nations, 1989), and the treaty bodies have long treated sweeping references to religious law as exactly that kind of impermissible reservation, since a state could otherwise sign a treaty and then opt out of almost all of it. Protecting children from forced marriage sits at the core of the Convention’s purpose, so a broad religious-law reservation cannot lawfully cancel it.
Read together, the two Treaties leave little room for doubt. In 2014, the expert committees that oversaw them issued joint guidance on harmful practices, agreeing that 18 years should be the minimum age of marriage and that a child cannot give the full, free, and informed consent that marriage demands (CEDAW & CRC Committees, 2014). The same standard of free and full consent runs through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (United Nations, 1948). Decree No. 18 fails on both counts. It permits marriage below the age of 18, and it treats a girl’s silence as a yes.
There is a hard truth behind these lines of treaty law. On paper, Article 16 of CEDAW means a child’s marriage has no legal standing at all, however a Taliban court records it. In the life of a fifteen-year-old in Daikundi, that protection is worth nothing unless someone acts on it. International law can declare a marriage void and still leave a girl locked inside it. That gap, between rule and reality, is exactly where these children are standing.
Primary Drivers of Child Marriage
The new law comes at a moment when poverty and the loss of schooling are already driving families to marry off their daughters, and it hands that trend a legal authorisation.
The clearest driver is education, or the lack of it. Afghanistan is the only country in the world that bars girls from secondary school and forbids access to university to women. Secondary schooling for girls has been suspended since September 2021, and universities were closed to women in December 2022. UNICEF estimates that by 2025 around 2.2 million Afghan girls had been pushed out of secondary education, a figure it warns could pass four million by 2030 if nothing changes (UNICEF, 2025). When a girl can no longer study and cannot expect to work, many families come to see marriage as her only remaining path. UNICEF warned as early as 2021 that the school ban would drive child marriage upward (UNICEF, 2021).
Another key driver is money. Afghanistan’s economy has shrunk sharply since 2021, after foreign aid was cut and billions of dollars in central bank reserves were frozen abroad. Millions of families cannot meet their basic needs. Within this setting, a daughter can become a source of cash. The custom of bride price, in which the groom’s family pays the bride’s family, turns a girl into immediate income for a household facing hunger or debt. Reporting from inside the country has described families marrying off very young girls, and in some cases promising infants, in return for money (Joya, 2026).
How large is the rise? The issue lays in the fact that reliable national figures have not been gathered since the Taliban returned. The dependable starting point is UNICEF’s estimate that about 28 percent of Afghan women had married before 18 (UNICEF, 2021). Beyond that, activists quoted by the Guardian offer a far higher and far more troubling estimate, suggesting that around 70 percent of girls kept out of school have been pushed into early or forced marriage, two thirds of them being under 18 (Joya, 2026). That figure should be read as an active warning rather than a verified statistic. Even so, it points the same way as everything else, which is steeply upward.
The Consequences for Girls
Child marriage is not only a question of rights on paper. It does measurable, lasting damage to the girls caught in it, and the new law makes that damage harder to escape.
The first harm is to health. Girls who marry young tend to become pregnant young, before their bodies are ready, and pregnancy in the mid-teens is far more dangerous than it is a few years later. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN agency for reproductive health, reports that girls who give birth in adolescence face a much higher risk of death and serious injury in childbirth than women in their twenties (UNFPA, 2025). Afghanistan already carries one of the heaviest burdens of maternal death in the world, and early marriage is one of the main reasons that figure stays so high. The babies of child mothers are also more likely to be born too small and die at infancy.
The second harm is the loss of a girl’s education and independence for good. Marriage almost always ends her schooling, which locks a young woman into a life with few choices and no income of her own. UNICEF has estimated that keeping girls out of school costs Afghanistan at least 500 million American dollars a year in lost economic activity, on top of a deepening shortage of the female teachers, doctors and midwives the country, who are currently desperately needs (UNICEF, 2025). The cost is paid twice, once by the girl and again by everyone who will never be taught or treated by the woman she might have become.
The third harm is violence and isolation, and this is where Decree No. 18 turns a private tragedy into a legal trap. Fereshta Abbasi, an Afghan human rights lawyer and researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), the international organisation that documents abuses around the world, warns that the Code tries to regulate and even validate some forms of child marriage while making it harder for the girl or woman involved to get out of one. As she puts it, a girl no longer has real legal protection to go to a court and seek help, and none of the narrow routes the law leaves open are easy to use under Taliban rule (Kumar, 2026). The previously mentioned case of the girl in Daikundi is what this looks like in practice. She was hurt repeatedly, she had nowhere to go, and the people around her sent her back each time until she did not survive it. Because forced and child marriage rest on the absence of free consent, organisations that study modern slavery count them among its most common forms (Walk Free, 2026).
Responses From the UN and Rights Groups
The reaction from the rest of the world towards the Taliban has been loud and united. UNAMA issued the strongest official statement, expressing grave concern and warning that Decree No. 18 implies child marriage is permitted (UNAMA, 2026). Richard Bennett, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, an independent expert appointed by the UN to monitor and report on abuses there, has gone further. He argues that the treatment of women in Afghanistan is so systematic that it amounts to a crime against humanity, and he has urged governments to recognise and outlaw what he calls gender apartheid, while warning that turning that idea into binding law will take years (Crawford, 2026).
There has also been movement in the courts. In July 2025, the International Criminal Court (ICC), the permanent tribunal in The Hague that prosecutes the gravest crimes, issued arrest warrants for Akhundzada and the Taliban’s chief justice. The judges found reasonable grounds to believe the two men “have committed by ordering, inducing or soliciting the crime against humanity of persecution, under article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute, on gender grounds against girls, women and other persons non-conforming with the Taliban’s policy on gender, gender identity or expression” (ICC, 2025). The Taliban rejected the warrants and do not recognise the Court, so their force is mainly symbolic for now. Yet they oblige the Court’s member states to arrest the men if they ever set foot on their soil.
Human rights organisations and Afghan activists have spoken with one voice. More than a hundred groups called for Decree No. 18 to be withdrawn at once. Roqia Saee, co-founder of the Afghan Women’s History Transformation Movement, a network of Afghan women campaigning for their rights, called the Code one of the most worrying legal steps under the Taliban and said the de facto authority had chosen to expand child marriage by writing it directly into law (Joya, 2026). Inside the country, where protest is banned and punished, some women still filmed themselves spraying the words against child marriage on walls.
Conclusion
Decree No. 18 is not a small technical tidy-up of divorce rules. It moves child marriage from something the Taliban quietly allowed to something their legal system now recognises, and it does so at the very moment when hunger and the school ban are pushing more families to marry off their daughters. The same law that blesses these marriages also bolts shuts the only door a girl might use to escape one. That is what makes it so dangerous, and it is why outrage on its own is not a response.
A word of caution belongs to the outset. Some of the most striking figures in this account, including the claim that 70 percent of out-of-school girls have been pushed into marriage, are estimates drawn from activists rather than verified surveys, because reliable data collection has been stopped. The exact wording of Decree No. 18 likewise reaches the outside world through reporting and translation rather than an official text. None of this softens the central fact. By the Taliban’s own admission, the marriage of children is now part of the law of Afghanistan.
There are real limits to what the outside world can do, and it helps to be clear about them. No government and no organisation can force a sovereign state, or the authorities that hold power in one, to repeal a domestic law, and the Taliban have made it plain that they regard marriage and the treatment of women as internal matters. Condemnation from distant capitals has its place, but on its own it tends to change very little. The more promising path is sustained, which is direct engagement with the de facto authorities by the actors who actually have access inside the country. As Roza Otunbayeva, then head of UNAMA, has argued, talking to the Taliban does not grant them legitimacy, yet it can encourage change in a way that isolation cannot (United Nations, 2023).
This is, before anything else, a child-protection question. A child cannot give free and informed consent to marriage and cannot be expected to defend her own interests against the adults around her, which is the whole reason international law fixes a minimum age in the first place. The people who decide whether a young girl is married off are not officials in foreign ministries. They are local administrators, religious scholars and village elders inside Afghanistan, the same kind of elders who in Daikundi kept persuading a beaten child to return to her husband. Reaching those people is therefore central. Neutral humanitarian organisations that already hold quiet, confidential dialogue with the authorities and work closely with religious and community leaders, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) among them, are far better placed to raise the welfare of these girls than statements issued thousands of miles away (ICRC, 2025). UN agencies with a field presence can press the same case in the rooms where it might actually land.
Alongside local dialogue and engagement, the key drivers have to be addressed. Because girls are so often married for a bride price when a family runs out of options, humanitarian funding that reaches households directly lowers the pressure that turns a daughter into a source of cash. As education has proven to be the strongest protection against early marriage, donors should keep pressing for girls’ schools to reopen while also funding community-based and online learning that can reach girls in the meantime. Accountability still matters as a backstop, through efforts such as the International Criminal Court warrants of July 2025 and the wider effort to name gender apartheid as a crime, so that those responsible know the cost will not simply fade.
The stakes of Decree No. 18 reach beyond the text of any single article. A minimum age of marriage is one of the plainest protections a legal system can offer a child, and its removal marks how far the ground has shifted for Afghan women and girls since 2021. They have lost their schools, their access to the courts, and now the recognition that a child cannot consent to marriage at all. Restoring what has been taken will be the work of years rather than statements, and it will depend on sustained engagement rather than passing attention. What should not be in doubt is the principle at stake. A child’s silence was never a form of consent, and no decree can make it one..BIBLIOGRAPHY
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