Internal self-determination and the struggle of minorities in Afghanistan: between legal entitlement and political tension

Self-determination, according to most, is about secession, a people detached from one state to form their own. That’s the external dimension. The internal definition of self-determination is quieter and, in practice, more consequential for the majority of the world’s minorities, who live within states they didn’t choose and can’t leave.

Internal self-determination means the right of a people to pursue their own political, economic, social, and cultural development within an existing state, typically through meaningful participation in governance. Nasir Qadri, in The Basis of the Right to Self-Determination, puts it plainly: outside the context of decolonization, self-determination "has an internal nature that consists of a people’s right to freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development, ideally through democratic governance." Article 1 of both the ICCPR and the ICESCR states this without qualification: all peoples have the right to self-determination, by virtue of which they freely determine their political status and are able to freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development. The text is explicit in implying that all people, not some, are included.

The implication that gets missed most often is this: self-determination is a peoples’ right, not a state’s right. The state is the mechanism through which the right is either honored or denied. Father Robert Araujo, writing in the Fordham International Law Journal, makes the deeper logic explicit: self-determination is the connective tissue of human rights law, the exercise through which popular sovereignty becomes real. By its denial, the structure of rights protection doesn’t weaken gradually. It collapses from the foundation.

Ulrike Barten’s Minorities, Minority Rights and Internal Self-Determination (Springer, 2015) closes the gap between “peoples” and minorities and shows how states have often used this distinction to exclude minorities from both categories and their associated rights.. The tradition that self-determination belongs to citizens, and that minorities are something different, cannot withstand scrutiny once you examine how fully minority rights overlap with the political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions which self-determination is supposed to protect.

The US-led intervention in 2001, opened a little window for Afghanistan’s minorities after the Bonn conference. In this era, minorities gained constitutional recognition, entered parliament, and achieved limited but real gains in education and public life. Afghanistan’s 2004 Constitution, despite being imperfect in many ways, established formal democratic institutions which guaranteed equal rights and participation regardless of ethnicity and religion. By creating a civic space, it at least acknowledged that all of Afghanistan’s communities had a claim on the state.

The Taliban ended that acknowledgement in a single week. The governing structure that replaced it is ethnically homogeneous at every level. As of 2026, no member of minority communities has held a senior ministerial position. The legitimating principle is not representation; it is a theological interpretation of a particular Deobandi tradition, applied by men from a particular ethnic background, accountable to no electorate. This is documented not by advocacy organizations but by UNAMA, the UN’s own mission on the ground, and by Human Rights Watch, whose reporting on targeted killings of Hazara civilians runs to hundreds of pages. Afghanistan is becoming, in practice, a mono-ethnic, mono-religious (Hanafi sect) state and is being administered as if the other communities within it either don’t exist or don’t matter.

The ICCPR and ICESCR principles are clear-cut on the issue of self-determination. The 1970 Declaration on Friendly Relations (GA Res. 2625) requires governments to represent their entire population without distinction as to race, ethnicity, or color. The 1992 UN Minority Rights Declaration specifies minority rights to participation, cultural expression, and non-discrimination with enough precision that Afghanistan’s current governance fails on every count. Afghanistan, as a UN member state, is bound by these norms in theory. The problem is enforcement, legitimacy, and political will. In the practical sense, the fact that the Taliban regime per se is not a signatory to any human rights instrument and does not recognize the authority of treaty bodies, cannot justify the violation of these rights.

Afghanistan became a party to these treaties as a fully recognized state (de jure recognition); hence, legally speaking, the current de facto regime does not have the legitimate authority to denounce or terminate these binding treaty obligations. Nonetheless, the country is governed by theological decree, not constitutional charter.

What Afghanistan reveals is not simply a failure of governance. It is a test case for the limits of international human rights law in situations where formal legal obligations exist but institutional enforcement does not. It is clear enough that the failure of enforcement cannot be explained as ambiguity. Those are different problems with different remedies, and conflating them, treating this as a legal puzzle rather than a political failure, is how the international community, which has retreated to cautious engagement rather than principled accountability, avoids responsibility for the latter. The question of whether Afghanistan still meets any recognizable standard of internal self-determination must be answered in the negative.