The United Nations Human Rights Council has recently approved the creation of an independent investigative mechanism to document, consolidate, and preserve evidence of international crimes and human rights violations committed in Afghanistan. The resolution, which was adopted by consensus on October 6, 2025, marks a turning point in the global response to Afghanistan’s deepening crisis of impunity.
Led by the European Union, the resolution tasks the new mechanism with investigating grave abuses by all actors, including the Taliban, the Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP), former government and security forces, and international military actors. Its purpose is to ensure that evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and gender persecution is preserved for future prosecution.
This mechanism is the result of years of advocacy by Afghan civil society and human rights organizations, including the now-disbanded Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC). Calls for such an initiative date back to the early 2000s, gaining new urgency after the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021.
Over four decades of conflict have left millions of Afghans without justice. Successive regimes, the Soviet invasion of late 1970s, Mujahideen, Taliban, Republic, and now Taliban again, have presided over systematic abuses: arbitrary detention, extrajudicial killings, torture, and the persecution of women and minorities. The Taliban’s most recent rule has intensified these violations, creating what experts and Afghan women’s rights advocates describe as a system of gender apartheid that bleeds into every aspect of life for women.
Richard Bennett, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, called it “a vital tool.“
Unlike the International Criminal Court (ICC), this new investigative mechanism does not have prosecutorial powers. Instead, it will collect and preserve evidence to support future prosecutions at both national and international levels. The UN resolution explicitly calls for cooperation between the mechanism and the ICC, which has already issued arrest warrants for senior Taliban officials on charges of gender persecution as a crime against humanity.
The mechanism is also expected to investigate officials responsible for enforcing Taliban edicts, including bans on education, employment, and freedom of movement for women and girls, restrictions that constitute gender persecution under international law.
Though it cannot deliver justice on its own, the new mechanism’s establishment signals that the world is no longer willing to ignore Afghanistan’s descent into total impunity. This mechanism is only the beginning and it ignites the path toward long-overdue justice for victims in Afghanistan.
For Afghan women, who have been systematically erased from public life since the Taliban’s takeover, this development offers a measure of recognition that has been long denied. It affirms that the crimes committed against them are not cultural or political issues, but violations of international law.
While the mechanism established cannot yet prosecute, it represents the beginning of an accountability process that could one day hold Taliban leaders responsible for their system of gender apartheid, which has deliberately erased women from education, employment, and public participation in Afghanistan.
The evidence it gathers will form the foundation of future trials, truth commissions, and reparations efforts. It is a powerful message that victims’ suffering will not remain invisible or ignored.
Accountability will not come overnight. However, with this UN-mandated evidence-gathering mechanism, the international community has taken a long-awaited concrete step toward ensuring that Afghanistan’s crimes are not forgotten and that the Taliban’s war on women is recorded and ultimately punished under international law.
