Standing Up for Human Rights

The Kabul office of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission is full of desperate men and women, seeking help and waiting patiently for hours.

There are fathers worried sick that their missing child may have been kidnapped. There are abused wives seeking to escape violent marriages and gain advice on divorce. And there are relatives of prisoners who claim they were wrongly accused by a judiciary and police force notorious for corruption.

It’s just another day for Dr Sima Samar, the head of the commission, and her team.

"For every good story, we hear 20 bad ones,” she sighed. She’s an optimistic woman, but confesses, “Sometimes I just don't know what to do!"

Afghanistan is still a long way from becoming a state where people enjoy their full human rights, Samar, a medical doctor turned civil rights activist who risks intimidation and even assassination to help her country along the route.

Samar knows at first hand the trauma of losing a loved one. Her first husband was arrested and killed during the communist regime, leaving her with a baby son. She has subsequently remarried.

During the communist period and factional wars, she fled to Pakistan, where she lived for 17 years and worked with Afghan refugees in the camps around Quetta.

She first came to international attention in June 2002, when she was elected as deputy head of the emergency Loya Jirga.

But when she moved to sit on the deputy's chair, an uproar rose from conservative delegates, demanding that she apologise for statements she had made accusing fundamentalists of violating Shariat, Islamic law. The conservative newspaper Payam-e-Mujahed, run by the fundamentalist Jamiat-e-Islami Party, branded her a non-Muslim.

She went on to serve as one of five deputy premiers during the interim administration of President Hamed Karzai and as his minister of women's affairs.

Last year, she was awarded the The John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, which cited her remarkable courage and personal bravery in speaking up for the rights of Afghan women, even when her life was at stake, and for providing a beacon of hope to all who are fighting for human rights around the world.

She longs for the day when the rule of law reigns and people will enjoy full human rights - freedom of speech, education, reasonable living conditions and a life free from the gun.

“If true civil society comes to Afghanistan in 30 years time, then we will feel that we have been successful," said Samar, 51, smiling despite the daunting task ahead.

People across Afghanistan often see Samar's commission, with its staff of 330, as their only hope. “People come to us with their claims. We keep their secrets and refer their cases to the government [when necessary],” she said.

The commission has investigated over 2,500 cases of human rights violations since it first threw open its doors on June 6, 2002. They have had a 70 per cent success rate of resolving the cases, according to the commission’s violation office.

"It is run for Afghans by Afghans committed to changing their country for the better," said Samar.

Commission offices extend from the northern provinces of Balkh, Kunduz, Badakhshan and Maimana to the southern provinces of Kandahar and Paktia; and from the capital through the central province of Bamian to Herat in the west.

The Kabul headquarters is a modern building, set within a guarded compound. Samar sits behind a curved desk wearing a light blue shalwar and chemise and a grey waistcoat, deliberately cut to look like a man's traditional outfit. A white scarf partially covers her short grey hair.

She reeled off the five main areas in which the commission works: educating women about their rights; educating men and women about human rights; investigating abuse of children's rights; investigating breaches of human rights; and helping to bring transitional justice – including gathering information on war crimes for future trials.

The commission successfully lobbied for equal male and female rights to be in the Afghan constitution. It now runs numerous educational programs to inform women about their rights.

"We are doing research on women who are arrested for leaving their husbands and fathers' houses because of abuse and inhuman treatment,” she said.

"In this country any woman who leaves home is imprisoned and so we try to get them released, but we don't want them to go back to their homes, because they may leave again.

“So we are trying to make the government build shelters for them and provide them with work opportunities."

The broader education programme on human rights involves work with mullahs, teachers and students, police, officers, soldiers of the Afghan National Army, and recently demobilised members of militias.

One of the most active campaigns the commission has done, together with non-governmental organisations and the United Nation's Children's Fund, is to try to tackle the growing problem of kidnapped children, Samar said.

Several hundred boys and girls have disappeared over the last year-and-a-half, abducted for sexual abuse, slavery, child marriage and prostitution. Some are taken abroad while others are moved to another part of Afghanistan.

To combat this, Samar said, the commission has worked on a National Action Plan against child kidnapping. In 2004, the government responded to the problem by issuing tougher sentences for those convicted.

The commission also visits jails across the country every month and seeks to gain the release of prisoners whose cases they have investigated and who they argue are innocent.

Samar recalls, "A commission staff member saw a pile of wet sticks during a visit to one of the jails in Herat province." When the staff member asked what the sticks were for, she was told, "The prisoners won't confess without punishment."

The work of the commission in transitional justice involves investigating past crimes. It’s a task that demands resources that the commission currently lacks. So for now, they are simply collecting documentary evidence.

The human rights commission has published a magazine to provide a forum where family members of murder victims can publicise details of the case in the hope that witnesses will come forward.

“We ask people to give us information such as the name [of the dead relative] and the date of the murder… if they know it," she said.

Samar does get frustrated by the commission’s limitations. "We hand over all the reports of our investigations to the president's office,” she said. His office is then responsible for following the cases up, but because central authority does not extend across the country, some cases are not taken further.

She admits that some Afghans have unrealistic expectations of her staff. Some people even expect the commission to judge criminals –but it doesn’t have that authority, she says.

And she and her staff do feel under a lot of pressure. "I am threatened every day – I've never counted how many times,” she said. “I’m threatened by people who have no faith in human rights and by people who committed crimes and know that the very existence of the commission is a threat to them."

Yet she defiantly refuses to match violence with violence. "We don't have armed guards," said Samar. "If we were to protect ourselves with armed guards, who will protect the ordinary people in our country? We trust in God – and in people.”

Hafizullah Gardesh is an IWPR editor based in Kabul.