In January 2026, Taliban published a new Criminal Procedure Code in Afghanistan and proposed it as a legal reform, a clean set of rules to introduce sanity to courts and criminal justice. But the doctrine which Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada signed and distributed as a law is rather a plan than a process. It is far beyond trials and evidence. It pushes to faith, rhetoric, devotion, culture and family living and reduces the law to a day-to-day obedience questionnaire. When a criminal code starts to police what people think, see, congregate and talk about rulers, it has at that moment stopped being a justice system but has become a government weapon.

The major concern is not heavy punishment. It is the way the Code redefines the notion of the concept of justice itself. The contemporary law order is founded on transparency and equality and limitation of state powers. This Code instead, builds a ladder, upon which the wide discretion is referred to the hands of those in charge of execution. The result is projected to be dangerous. Unclear infractions are simple to prosecute, hard to secure, and virtually impossible to be safe. Such a court is not protecting its citizens against despotism. It also ensures the dominance over the citizens and the judges, and the officials are implementers of ideology and not neutral arbiters.

The most explicative of them is the categorical division of the society into four legal groups, scholars, elites, middle classes and lower........

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