On April 9, 2024, for the first time in history, a full session of the United Nations Security Council received a briefing on security issues impacting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) people during the council’s quarterly meeting on Colombia. In her statement, the director of the human rights organization Colombia Diversa called on the council to “send a powerful signal to the LGBTQ population in Colombia that their lives matter and that you will stand by your commitment to protect their rights.”

In September Australia, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands formally called upon Afghanistan to cease what the countries say are violations of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). This begins the process for the four countries to file a case with the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ). 

For most of the three years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, their erasure of women’s rights appeared to be setting them on course for near-total isolation in the world.

Western and Islamic countries alike condemned the group’s most extreme strictures, particularly on girls’ education. Messages by Taliban officials that their government was eager to engage with the world were ignored. To this day, no country officially recognizes the Taliban as the lawful authorities in Afghanistan.

But in recent months, the political winds have begun to shift in the Taliban’s favor.

As we sit here today, Afghan women and girls are experiencing renewed gender persecution, including gender and sexual-based violence. The Taliban has issued more than 80 archaic edicts: Curtailing freedom of speech. Barring girls over the age of 12 from pursuing an education. Implementing so-called “morality laws” that effectively erase women from public life.

This institutional oppression is an attack on human rights and a threat to Afghanistan’s security, stability, and economy. And those who raise their voice in protest risk harassment, detention, and violence.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled on Friday that gender and nationality alone were sufficient for a country to grant asylum to women from Afghanistan, where the ruling Taliban have sharply curtailed women’s rights.

Authorities in Austria refused refugee status to two Afghan women after they applied for asylum in 2015 and 2020. They challenged the refusal before the Austrian Supreme Administrative Court, which in turn requested a ruling from the ECJ, the top European Union court.

In the spring of 2012, members of a militia known as Ansar Dine seized control of Timbuktu, in Mali. The militia, which was working with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, meant to restore “proper” Islam to a city it saw as corrupted by secular influence. It forbade women from wearing jewelry, leaving the house at night, being alone with men other than their husbands, and even from speaking to their own brothers-in-law and cousins. When more than a hundred women gathered to protest the rules, the militants fired shots in the air to disperse them.

The extremist group also required women to cover themselves almost entirely, and to dress in a way that concealed the shape of their bodies. Women and girls who were detained, often for violating the dress code, were at risk of rape. “We couldn’t go out; we couldn’t play or go to school,” a woman named Halimatou, who was fifteen when Ansar Dine invaded, recalled. Like many girls, she was married off to one of its fighters. More than a decade later, she and her family still suffer stigma from that forced marriage.

In March, a little-known volunteer organization dedicated to “reviving the religious and secular unity of the Russian people” escorted agents from the Internal Affairs Ministry and the Russian National Guard on a raid in the remote city of Orenburg, a city of 500,000 near the Kazakh border.

Their target was a bar called Pose, which was locally famous for its drag shows. The volunteer organization, called Russian Community Orenburg, posted videos of the raid online, highlighting people in skimpy outfits, asking attendees why they were in a “faggot bar,” and showing clubgoers cowering on the floor as agents conducted their search.

Oleksii Polukhin’s 64 days in detention began when Russian soldiers stopped him at a checkpoint. They found that he’d been gathering information about Russian military positions to share with Ukrainian forces; they also discovered he was gay. Mr. Polukhin gave a detailed account of his detention to Projector, an Odesa-based human rights organization. He also confirmed the details to me in a series of interviews.

It was May 2022, just 10 weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Polukhin lived in Kherson, a southern city of around 250,000 people that the Russians conquered with blinding speed in the war’s early days. Mr. Polukhin, rail thin and then 22 years old, was on his way to take pictures of a May 9 Victory Day parade organized by the occupying forces, which he planned to send to a network that shared information from occupied territory. He had been keeping close track of the locations of Russian checkpoints, he said, but this new one caught him by surprise. He was forced to unlock his phone for the soldiers, where they discovered L.G.B.T.Q. Telegram channels, including one that he ran.