Taliban Decree: Silence Now Counts as Consent for Marriage

Close to 100. That is the number that matters most, because it is how Equality Now counts the edicts, decrees and directives the Taliban's de facto authorities have issued against women and girls in five years back in power ⁸. Read it slowly and its scale becomes physical: a new restriction roughly every two and a half weeks for five years, touching voice, movement, school, work, dress and now marriage itself. The anniversaries that fell on August 14-15, 2026, five years after the Taliban regained power on August 15, 2021, were marked not as a pause but as an inventory, with the BBC and Equality Now publishing retrospectives on lives described as unrecognisable ³⁸¹⁰. Decree No. 18 is only the latest entry, and in many ways the most intimate.

In early May 2026, the Ministry of Justice quietly published Decree No. 18, officially the "Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses," a 31-article legal code governing marriage and judicial separation ⁹. It did not arrive with a press conference or an official English translation. It arrived as bureaucratic text, and its meaning had to be pieced together by translators, analysts and reporters in the weeks that followed. What drew immediate attention was a single rule of consent: a virgin girl's silence can be treated as consent to marriage ⁵⁶⁹. The Times of India reported the provision verbatim as: "Silence of virgin girl can be treated as consent" ⁶. A follow-up summarized the backlash in four words: "Virgin's silence is consent" ¹¹. PolicyEast confirms both the decree's title and the silence-as-consent provision, noting critics say it erodes women's legal autonomy by not requiring explicit agreement ⁷.

The code does more than lower the bar for saying yes. According to the analysis published by MEMRI on May 29, 2026, it upholds Shari'a law allowing marriage of pre-pubescent girls, seeks to prevent dissolution of a marriage if a girl was married off by her father or grandfather, and permits dissolution only if she was married off by a "wali" (guardian) ⁵. In plain language, that is a hierarchy of male authority written into family law. A father or grandfather's decision is treated as close to final. Only a more distant guardian's decision leaves a clearer door open to a court. For girls married very young, before they could understand or contest what was happening, the law as analyzed offers almost no backward path to undo it.

The United Nations saw the danger early. On Thursday, May 21, 2026, the UN expressed "grave concern" that the new law on separation in marriage includes provisions on child marriage ². The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan issued a statement that week raising the same alarm ⁹. The language was diplomatic, but the sequence mattered. Within weeks of quiet publication came international recognition that this was not a technical reform of divorce procedure. It was a substantive change to when a girl can be considered to have agreed to be a wife, and how hard it will be for her to stop being one.

By late June, that abstraction had names and houses attached to it. The Guardian on June 23, 2026 documented women with "almost no independent right to end a marriage," quoting a mother who said: "I don't know how to save my daughter from her husband" ⁴. The paper's reporting found families watching abuse continue because the new marriage law had closed the exits they once might have used ⁴. NBC, in its anniversary reporting, described the broader rollback as formalized in a penal code that experts say makes it almost impossible for women to escape abuse ¹⁰. Taken together, the two findings describe a legal pincer: consent made easier to presume at the start, separation made harder to obtain at the end.

That pincer did not appear from nowhere. The decree extends a five-year ratchet of restrictions that includes face-covering requirements and bans on most workplaces and universities, with girls barred from public secondary schools ³⁸. Equality Now's five-year assessment lists the scope from bans on women's voices in public to sharply limited education and work, and crucially, no minimum age for marriage ⁸. There is no line in the sources provided that sets a protective floor under Decree No. 18. MEMRI describes "pre-pubescent" girls but gives no codified age, and no source here provides the full official text, an official Taliban translation, or the decree's precise age thresholds ²⁵⁶⁷. The absence of a minimum age is itself the point critics keep returning to: without it, silence can cover childhood.

This is why the legal mechanics deserve close attention rather than dismissal as cultural difference. Requiring no explicit agreement shifts the burden of refusal onto the person with the least power in the room. A girl who does not speak, who does not understand, who is frightened, who has been told not to shame her family, is recorded by the logic of the provision as agreeing. And if her marriage was arranged by her father or grandfather, the MEMRI reading says the code seeks to prevent dissolution ⁵. PolicyEast's summary is blunter in effect: without explicit agreement, legal autonomy erodes ⁷. For outside readers accustomed to marriage as a contract requiring an affirmative yes, the inversion is the story. Silence, which in most legal systems means nothing, is made to mean everything.

There is also what we do not know, and it is substantial. No source in this file provides the full official text of Decree No. 18, an official Taliban translation, the decree's enforcement mechanisms, or prevalence data on child marriage since its issuance ²⁵⁶⁷. Any verbatim official Taliban response defending the law is absent from all provided sources ²⁵⁶⁷. That gap should be flagged, not filled. It means we cannot yet say how judges and local officials are instructed to apply the silence rule, what penalties or procedures surround it, how often it has been invoked, or how the authorities answer the charge that it legalizes child marriage. The human costs suggested by early reporting are real, but their precise scale is still to be measured.