Access to justice and human rights in Afghanistan
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Access to justice and human rights in Afghanistan Antonio De Lauri
Published online: 26 April 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract In anthropological and legal literature, the phenomenon termed ‘legal pluralism’ has been interpreted as a co-presence of legal orders which act in relation to their own ‘levels’ of referring ‘fields’. The Afghan normative network is generally described in terms of pluralism, where different normative systems such as customs, shari’a (Islamic law), state laws and principles deriving from international standard of law (e.g., human rights) coexist. In order to address the crucial question of access to justice, in this article, I stress the category of legal pluralism by introducing the hypothesis of an inaccessible normative pluralism as a key concept to capture the structural injustices of which Afghans are victims. Access to justice can be considered a foundational element of every legal project. Globally, the debates concerning the diffusion and application of human rights develop at the same time ideologically, politically, and pragmatically. Today in Afghanistan, these levels are expressed in all their complexity and ambivalence. It is therefore particularly significant to closely observe the work done by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and to discuss the issue of human rights by starting from a reflection on what might be defined a socio-normative condition of inaccessibility.
Introduction Together with the war that caused the fall of the Taliban regime, a massive international intervention started in 2001 with the declared aim to reconstruct the country. A few lines of action were identified at the core of this humanitarian project, such as the reform of the armed forces, counter-narcotics, the establishment of a police force, disarmament of militias, and legal reconstruction (see for example [74]). From the Afghanistan National Development Strategies to the National Justice Sector Strategy and so on, a series of legal interventions (i.e. codification, reconstruction of infrastructure such as tribunals and prisons, formation of judges and prosecutors) has been A. De Lauri (*) Forum Transregionale Studien/Rechtskulturen, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Wallotstr. 19, 14193 Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
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undertaken by foreign governments (e.g., the Italian Justice Project Office) and international agencies such as the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) or the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Piles of reports have been written since then on how to build a new justice system in Afghanistan. What happened on the ground and what is the impact that these interventions had on the social fabric is a different story. Yet, though this paper aims at destabilizing certainties (e.g., the undisputed vantage of certain forms of human rights implementation), as many others focusing on what happens in Afghanistan, it is probably not totally immune from the temptation to say how
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