Since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban regime has been rigorously introducing laws and reforms to consolidate its control over the state. On 7th January 2026, the Taliban quietly introduced and enforced a new Criminal Procedure Code across Afghanistan. The new law was signed by the Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, and circulated to provincial courts without consultation or public debate, the document was presented as a technical framework for regulating judicial process. In reality, it signals a far more consequential shift: law is no longer meant to restrain power, but to compel ideological obedience.

The law consists of 119 articles and ten chapters, the code governs not only criminal procedure but social conduct, religious belief, political loyalty, family relations, and personal behavior. Rather than placing limits on state authority, it expands directing judicial power toward hierarchy, discipline, and coercion. Courts under this system no longer function as independent arbiters of justice. Instead, they serve as enforcement mechanisms for a moral and political order defined by Taliban leadership.

The most striking feature of the code is its formalization of class-based justice. Afghan society is divided into four legal categories: religious scholars, elites, the middle class, and the lower class. Punishment for the same offense varies according to social status, rather than the severity of the crime or the intent of the accused.

Under this framework, clerics are counseled, elites are summoned, middle-class individuals are imprisoned, and those classified as “lower class” are subjected to imprisonment combined with corporal punishment. This structure violates the most basic principle of modern law-equality before the law and recalls earlier systems in which justice functioned to preserve hierarchy rather than protect........

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