On October 5, 2026, the International Criminal Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber II unsealed arrest warrants for four senior Taliban figures: Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada, Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani, Education Minister Habibullah Agha, and Higher Education Minister Neda Mohammad Nadim. The warrants for Akhundzada and Haqqani were issued on July 8, 2025, when the court disclosed that they existed, while the warrants for Agha and Nadim were issued on September 9, 2025, and had stayed secret until now.
The judges found reasonable grounds to believe all four ordered, induced or solicited the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds against girls, women and people who do not conform to Taliban gender policy, and on political grounds against people seen as allies of women and girls, in Afghanistan since the Taliban took power on August 15, 2021. The warrants were made public with redactions, and all four suspects remain at large.
Image: International Criminal Court building, The Hague, by Choinowski, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.