KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – The UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) and Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, have condemned the Taliban’s public execution of a man in Badghis province and called for an immediate halt to capital punishment.
The man, identified as Ismail, was executed on Thursday at a sports stadium in Qala-e-Naw, the capital of Badghis province, in front of local authorities and a crowd of hundreds. The Taliban’s supreme court said Ismail had been convicted of shooting a man and a woman in the province, and that the execution was carried out with the approval of the group’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada.
This was the eleventh public execution carried out by the Taliban since their return to power in 2021. Earlier public executions have taken place in Farah, Ghazni, Laghman, Jowzjan, Badghis, and Nimruz provinces.
In a statement posted on X, the UN Human Rights Office said that public executions violate international law and that the death penalty more broadly is incompatible with the fundamental right to life.
Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called on the Taliban authorities to take concrete measures to “promptly abolish” the death penalty, beginning with an immediate moratorium on executions.
In a separate post, Richard Bennett described the death penalty as a “cruel, inhuman, and degrading practice that is also ineffective in deterring crime,” and reiterated his call for an immediate halt to public executions.
Since their return to power, the Taliban have also publicly flogged hundreds of people, including women and LGBTQ+ individuals, on a range of charges across Afghanistan. Despite repeated calls from the UN, rights groups, and activists to end public executions and corporal punishment, the Taliban continue these practices, citing enforcement of Sharia law in Afghanistan.
