Rights activists hail move to arrest Haibatullah Akhundzada and Afghan chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani for crimes against humanity

The international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders, accusing them of crimes against humanity for the persecution of women and girls.

In a statement, the ICC said on Tuesday there were “reasonable grounds to believe” the Taliban’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and Afghanistan’s chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, had ordered policies that deprived women and girls of “education, privacy and family life and the freedoms of movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion”.