The Taliban have publicly flogged more than 2,700 people in Afghanistan over the past four years, most of them over allegations of sexual and moral offenses, an Afghan rights group said in a report published on Tuesday.
The 92-page report, titled Whips of Power, Spectacle of Control: Documenting the Taliban’s Public Floggings, 2022-2026 and released by the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organisation, records 422 women, 1,761 men and 562 people whose gender was not specified beaten between 2022 and 2026. Kabul province accounted for 88 percent of those flogged, the highest share of any province, while Nuristan recorded the lowest, at 1 percent.
The group documented 262 public floggings in 2025, the most in any single year, against just 30 in 2023, the fewest. Most of those punished faced allegations involving relationships, sexual conduct or restrictions on women’s movement.
The beatings are often delivered before crowds, and the organisation said the Taliban use them as a tool of punishment, intimidation and social control. The report, which draws on 23 personal testimonies from victims, also documents arbitrary detention, forced confessions and defendants denied access to defense lawyers, evidence and witnesses.
Public flogging violates the prohibition of torture and ill-treatment along with the rights to privacy, movement, assembly and a fair trial, the group said. It said the findings could also be relevant under international law to possible crimes against humanity and war crimes, including torture, persecution and outrages upon personal dignity.
The organisation described Taliban policies toward women and girls as “gender apartheid” that should be recognized as a crime against humanity. It called on governments and international bodies to strengthen independent monitoring, pressed the United Nations to weigh the findings when examining the situation of Afghan women and girls, and asked the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to review evidence of alleged Taliban crimes as part of the court’s Afghanistan investigation.
The report lands as the Taliban have grown quieter about the practice. Their Supreme Court published reports on floggings until May, but has sharply restricted public access to information about corporal punishment since April 22, according to a review by Afghanistan International. The last court statement on a flogging sentence, dated April 22, said two defendants in Badakhshan had each been sentenced to a year in prison and 39 lashes over an alleged extramarital relationship.
The clampdown on information followed an Afghanistan International investigation, published April 25 and based on thousands of official Taliban court statements and material from U.N. experts and rights groups. It found that more than 107,550 lashes were inflicted on Afghan citizens from the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul in August 2021 through the end of March 2026.
U.N. experts, including Richard Bennett, the special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, have previously urged an end to corporal punishment, calling it an “assault on human dignity” that can amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Its widespread use for such alleged offenses, they said, is part of a broader system of structural gender discrimination and social control that is incompatible with Afghanistan’s international obligations.
The rights group called on the Taliban to revoke the orders permitting flogging and to end restrictions on the rights and freedoms of women, girls and other Afghan citizens.