A Lesson in Justice

Mohammad Azim sits in a prison cell in Mazar-e-Sharif, serving a ten-year prison sentence for robbery. Azim says he never had a chance to defend himself in court against the charge.

"No one invited me to court,” he told IWPR. “The police arrested me and took me to prison, and after awhile I heard that I had been sentenced to ten years."

More than a year after Afghanistan approved a new constitution, the rights of the accused and the responsibilities of prosecutors and judges remain a mystery to many of those involved in the legal system.

Now the Afghan government has decided to give the judiciary the training it needs to bring the laws to life. All judges, lawyers and investigators in the country will be enrolled in a one-month workshop designed to give them a thorough grounding in modern legal practices. Topics to be emphasised include awareness and observance of human rights, public trials, the right of the accused to a defence lawyer, and access to legal documents.

The workshop will offer instruction and practice in conducting trials, highlighting the individual responsibilities of the various members of the judiciary.

The training programme is being run by the Judicial Reforms Commission, the interior ministry, the prosecutor's office and the supreme court, and is being funded by the Italian government.

Instructors will be drawn from judges, lawyers and investigators who trained both in Afghanistan and abroad.

The programme began in the southern province of Paktia in January and, according to Gul Rahman, a member of the Judicial Reforms Commission, by December 2005 judicial officials in all of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces will have gone through the system.

In March, a similar workshop was conducted in Balkh, in the north of the country.

The response has been enthusiastic. “Before, we didn’t know what judges were supposed to do," said Abdul Ghafoor, deputy head of the Balkh court, and a workshop participant, "So sometimes we did the lawyers' job, and sometimes they carried out the work of the court and the investigators. Our responsibilities were unclear, and this created delays."

Things have speeded up considerably, he added, "Everyone now knows his job, and can perform very well."

Gul Ahmad Madadi, head of the human rights section at the interior ministry, who is teaching the human rights and investigation sections of the workshop, was uncompromising in his assessment of the present state of the judiciary.

"Over the past 20 years of war, the judicial system in Afghanistan has failed completely," he said. “An accused person is deprived of all his or her rights. Every person accused of a crime has the right to a lawyer, for example, but in the provinces this is not carried out."

But Madadi was hopeful that the training would make up for some of the deficiencies in the system, "By holding such workshops, we can help to rectify most of the mistakes that still exist in the Afghan judiciary, and a new system will replace the old."

Gul Rahman, who is also a trainer in the workshop, believes that problems with the judiciary are largely to blame for a general distrust of the government among Afghans.

“When we mention the court system to someone, he or she begins to shake with fear, which shows the judiciary system is not doing a good job in Afghanistan,” he said.

As for Azim’s case, Abdul Manan Mawlawi Zada, the head of the Balkh court, acknowledged that the system is flawed, but denied that any prisoner had been imprisoned without proper trial. "They are prisoners, and they are angry," he said. "Whatever they say, it isn't true.

"But with the new system, these problems will be solved. Trials will be public, and those who cannot afford a lawyer will be given one."

Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi is an IWPR staff writer in Mazar-e-Sharif.