On 8 March 2026, UN Women issued a warning built around a figure that sums up the collective failure, no country on the planet has achieved full legal equality between women and men. Globally, women hold only 64 per cent of the legal rights men enjoy. In 54 per cent of countries, rape is still not defined on the basis of consent, meaning a woman can be sexually assaulted without the law recognising it as a crime. That legal void coexists with documented, measurable extremes, from the Taliban regime that has made Afghanistan the worst-ranked country in the world for women, to the wars in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where sexual violence functions as a military tactic. This piece reconstructs that geography of oppression, the concrete rights it has stripped away, and the forms resistance takes even under direct repression. None of the figures below are speculative, each one traces back to an institution with a name, a mandate and a publication date.
The index that measures the cost of being born a woman
The Women, Peace and Security Index (WPS Index) 2025/26, produced by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security together with the Peace Research Institute Oslo, assesses 181 countries against 13 indicators combining inclusion, justice and security. Denmark tops the ranking for a third consecutive period. Afghanistan sits last, with a score three times lower than Denmark’s. The report from the UN Secretary-General accompanying the March warning confirms that 87 per cent of countries have passed laws against domestic violence, and more than 40 have strengthened constitutional protections for women and girls over the past decade. The rules exist. What fails, according to that same report, is enforcement, blocked by the stigmatisation of victims, community fear and social pressure that silences complaints. A law against domestic violence that is never invoked in court offers the same protection as a law that was never written, on paper the gap disappears, in practice it defines the difference between formal equality and lived security.
The WPS Index places Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Haiti, Sudan and the Central African Republic among the least safe countries for women, and extends low scores across much of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Central America. In Latin America, Guatemala and Honduras share 144th place out of 181, in the lowest quintile of the global ranking, Mexico also ranks among the countries facing the greatest security challenges for women, and Colombia sits in 149th place, with a score of 0.551 out of 1.
According to the WPS Index 2025/26 (Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security), women worldwide hold only 64 per cent of the legal rights men have, and in 54 per cent of countries rape is not defined by consent.
Afghanistan, the legal architecture of total exclusion
Even before the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, Afghanistan already ranked among the countries with the greatest gender inequality in the world, according to UN Women. What followed was not a gradual tightening but the deliberate construction of a regulatory framework. The new government installed itself without a single woman in its ranks, dissolved the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and dismantled the judicial mechanisms meant to protect against and hold accountable gender-based violence. In November 2022, the Taliban’s supreme leader decreed the full application of sharia as the governing code of conduct. In 2024 the so-called law of silence came into force, barring women’s voices from being heard in public spaces. This year, the new Taliban penal code set a penalty of just 15 days in prison for breaking a woman’s arm, against five months’ imprisonment for mistreating a camel, a disproportion that reveals where women sit in the regime’s legal hierarchy, a hierarchy written into statute rather than left to custom or informal practice.
The Taliban maintain that these restrictions exist within the framework of Islamic law, a phrase that within Islam itself admits very different readings. Sharia is built on the Quran, teachings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, and centuries of legal interpretation that vary by school of thought and region. Scholars such as Simon Perfect, of the British think tank Theos, note that Islam encourages the pursuit of knowledge equally for men and women, and that Muslim women held property rights from the earliest days of Islam, centuries before that right existed across much of Europe. In January 2025, at an international summit on girls’ education in Muslim communities held in Islamabad, Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai told dozens of Muslim leaders that Taliban actions amounted to gender apartheid, and accused them of concealing their crimes behind cultural and religious justifications. The lives of millions of women hang on that dispute, women who did not choose to be born under this particular interpretation, and who have, within the Taliban system itself, no legal mechanism to challenge it.
The UN Special Rapporteur for Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) have documented the case as an example of gender apartheid, a term describing the systematic, institutionalised exclusion of a group on the basis of its identity. Women cannot work outside the home without a male relative accompanying them, cannot conduct business with male traders, cannot be treated by male doctors, and are barred from secondary and university education. Visiting a relative’s home without a husband’s permission can mean prison, for the visitor and the host alike. In January 2025, the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court sought arrest warrants against Taliban leaders, a step Amnesty International described as decisive for the justice of Afghanistan’s women, girls and LGBTQI people. That same body documented millions of forced returns of Afghan nationals, many of them women, back to the country that persecutes them for their gender, in December 2025.
Sexual violence as a weapon of war
In Sudan, the war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which began in April 2023, has turned sexual violence into a tool of combat in Darfur and Kordofan. A report from the UN Human Rights Office documented 546 verified cases of sexual violence over three years of conflict, with 838 victims, including 539 women and 284 girls, a figure the report itself calls merely the tip of the iceberg of the real scale. Eighty-five women-led organisations operating in the country reported a significant rise in such cases in 2025, while 99 per cent face operational difficulties due to lack of funding and security restrictions.
In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Nations recorded at least 80,000 rape cases between January and September 2025, a 32 per cent rise on the same period in 2024. Human Rights Watch attributes the violence to armed groups such as M23, the Allied Democratic Forces, local militias, and also to members of the Congolese army itself, while assistance available to survivors has shrunk sharply amid cuts to international aid. Globally, the United Nations verified 9,788 cases of conflict-related sexual violence in 2025, more than double the previous year, documented across 21 distinct settings and including rape, sexual slavery, forced marriage and human trafficking. The Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Sudan and the Central African Republic accounted for the highest numbers of verified cases. Ninety-two per cent of victims were women and girls. The United Nations acknowledges, however, that the real figure is far higher, because for every case that reaches clinical care, between ten and twenty go unreported.
The United Nations verified 9,788 cases of conflict-related sexual violence in 2025, more than double the 2024 figure, the highest level since records began.
What is lost when the law becomes the exception
What these countries share is not a single mechanism but a similar outcome reached by different paths. In Afghanistan, exclusion was built by decree, article by article, until women became second-class legal subjects. In Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the collapse of state institutions left the territory in the hands of armed actors who treat women’s bodies as a battlefield. In both cases, the concrete rights that vanish are the same, access to education, the ability to work and move without male guardianship, participation in public and political life, and access to justice once abuse has already occurred. That last point is what holds up everything else, a right that exists on paper but cannot be enforced in a courtroom functions, for the woman who needs it, exactly like a right that was never granted. When more than half the world’s countries fail to recognise consent as the legal basis of rape, and when the judicial mechanisms meant to pursue these crimes are disabled by decree or overwhelmed by war, impunity stops being a system failure and becomes its operating logic.
There are, however, isolated signs that this impunity is not absolute everywhere. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 35 armed combatants were convicted of sexual violence last year, and more than 45,000 displaced people received medical, psychosocial and livelihood support. In Iraq, more than 2,500 reparation claims from Yazidi survivors were approved. In Colombia, former commanders of the now-defunct FARC have been charged before the Special Jurisdiction for Peace with war crimes that include sexual violence, a process the UN’s own Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict cited, in July 2026, as one of the few signs of hope within this year’s documented global backslide.
How women resist oppression
In Afghanistan, resistance does not take the form of mass protest, which was repressed with arrests and torture until it grew scarce. It takes the form of clandestine networks. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan runs secret classes in the rooms of private homes, where teenage girls and young women study secondary-level subjects while hiding their textbooks from brothers or husbands tied to the regime. Pashtana Durrani founded Learn Afghanistan, a network that now reaches 230 students over the age of 12, and argues that educating in secrecy, with all the risk it carries, has stopped being a choice and become the only option available.
In Iran, resistance took to the streets. The death of Jina Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police, in September 2022, allegedly for wearing her headscarf incorrectly, ignited the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. The protests have not gone out. In January 2026, fresh demonstrations faced live ammunition, internet blackouts and mass arrests, and activists such as Narges Mohammadi, winner of the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize, remain imprisoned in Evin. The regime keeps executing protesters linked to those demonstrations, most recently in June 2025. And still, every anniversary of Amini’s death fills streets the state keeps insisting on emptying by force.
Neither resistance has managed to overturn the legislation that oppresses it, and neither claims to be on the verge of doing so. But both hold, through different methods, the same conviction, that giving up public space or knowledge without a fight is not a real alternative, that surrender would cost more than the risk of resisting…
A.B.
Sources
- No country in the world has achieved full legal equality for women and girls
- WPS Index 2025/26 – Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security
- Colombia – Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security
- International report places Guatemala and Honduras among the most dangerous countries for women travellers – Infobae
- Afghan women’s global fight to have gender apartheid enshrined in international law
- Gender apartheid in Afghanistan, the legal architecture of oppression – E&J
- Human rights in Afghanistan – Amnesty International
- Women’s rights in Afghanistan depend on Islamic law. What is sharia – Prensa Libre
- Malala Yousafzai calls on Muslim leaders to openly reject the Taliban’s treatment of Afghan women – VOA
- Sexual violence takes hold as a weapon of war in Sudan after three years of conflict
- UN denounces systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war in Sudan – El Tiempo
- Sexual violence rises in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
- Conflict-related sexual violence doubles to reach unprecedented level – UN News
- Afghan women defy the Taliban with secret schools – Milenio
- The girls defying the Taliban ban in Afghanistan’s secret schools – Yahoo News
- Mahsa (Jina) Amini, what happened and what is Woman, Life, Freedom – Amnesty International
- Iran 2026, women at the front of the protests
- Iranian women rebel against the regime for freedom and rights
