• Taliban decree expands death penalty, bans dissent. UN
• Decree not yet released; UN urges Taliban to rescind it.
• Turk likens Taliban system to gender apartheid.
  

A new decree from Afghanistan’s Taliban government is set to further crush rights and freedoms in the war-torn nation, especially for women, UN human rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday.

The Taliban has restricted women’s movements and barred girls from education beyond primary school since coming to power in 2021, via a series of morality laws that also limit expression and employment.

Turk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said a decree signed by Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada last month “defines several crimes and punishments that contravene Afghanistan’s international legal obligations”.

“It provides for the use of corporal punishment for numerous offences, including in the home, legitimising violence against women and children,” he told a Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva.

“The decree, which is expected to come into effect soon, extends the number of offences that carry the death penalty.”

The decree also criminalises criticism of the de facto leadership and its policies, in violation of freedom of expression and assembly, he said.

Detailed provisions of the decree have not been officially published by the Taliban’s Ministry of Justice or Supreme Court, and Reuters has not been able to obtain the text from officials.

The Afghan administration did not respond to an immediate request for comment.

Turk urged the Taliban to rescind the decree, impose a moratorium on executions and end corporal punishment, saying women and girls face persecution under a system he likened to gender apartheid. The Taliban say women’s rights are internal matters and should be addressed locally.

President Donald Trump said that two Muslim Democratic US Representatives, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, should be “institutionalised” and sent back to “where they came from,” a day after they had a heated exchange with him during his State of the Union address.

Both Omar and Tlaib shouted “you’re killing Americans” at Trump during his speech, with Omar also calling him a “liar.”

In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump said the two lawmakers “had the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people, LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick who, frankly, look like they should be institutionalized.”

“We should send them back from where they came — as fast as possible,” Trump added. Both Omar and Tlaib are U.S. citizens.

House of Representatives Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries cast Trump’s rhetoric against Tlaib and Omar as “xenophobic” and “disgraceful.” Tlaib said on X that Trump’s comments showed “he is crashing out.”

Muslim advocacy group Council on American-Islamic Relations also said Trump’s comments were racist.

“It’s racist and bigoted to say two Muslim US lawmakers should be sent to the country they were born in or where their ancestors came from based on their criticism of the gunning down of Americans by ICE,” CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week that members of the media have “smeared” the president as a racist.

Trump’s immigration enforcement actions were criticised following two separate January fatal shootings of US citizens by federal agents in Minnesota. At least eight people have died in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centres since the start of 2026, following at least 31 deaths last year.

During his Tuesday speech, Trump reiterated his accusation that Somali communities in the US have engaged in fraud and claimed that “Somali pirates” had ransacked Minnesota. His administration had used fraud allegations to deploy armed federal immigration agents in Minnesota.

Trump has cast his actions as aiming to tackle fraud and improve domestic security.

Rights groups say the crackdown has created a fearful environment and that Trump has used isolated fraud cases as an excuse to target immigrants. They also dismiss Trump’s ability to tackle fraud, citing pardons from him to those who have faced fraud convictions in the past.

Trump also recently faced criticism after his social media account posted a video that contained a racist depiction of former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama.

The US Justice Department announced the arrest of a former Air Force fighter pilot who allegedly trained Chinese military personnel without authorisation.

Gerald Brown, 65, was arrested in Indiana after having recently returned to the United States from China, where he had been since December 2023, a Justice Department statement said.

He is accused of having “conspired with foreign nationals to provide combat aircraft training to pilots in the Chinese Air Force” without a required license from the US State Department, the statement said.

FBI director Kash Patel posted on X: “Major story… the FBI and our partners have arrested a former US Air Force Pilot who was allegedly training pilots in the Chinese military.”

Brown had a 24-year career in the US Air Force during which he “commanded sensitive units with responsibility for nuclear weapons delivery systems, led combat missions, and served as a fighter pilot instructor and simulator instructor on a variety of fighter and attack aircraft.”

He had retired from the military in 1996 and worked as a cargo pilot, the statement said, but he later began a role as a US defence contractor training pilots to fly the A-10 and state-of-the-art F-35 fighter jets.

He allegedly began negotiating a contract in August 2023 with Stephen Su Bin — a Chinese national who was imprisoned in the United States for four years beginning in 2016 over another espionage scheme — and travelled in December 2023 to China to begin his training job.

“The Chinese government continues to exploit the expertise of current and former members of the US armed forces to modernise China’s military capabilities,” said Roman Rozhavsky, an official with the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division.

“This arrest serves as a warning that the FBI and our partners will stop at nothing to hold accountable anyone who collaborates with our adversaries to harm our service members and jeopardise our national security,” he added.