After nearly 30 years of armed conflict in Afghanistan, legal education looks much like many parts of the country – riddled with bullet holes, factionalized, and barely functioning. The training of lawyers throughout the country is bifurcated between Faculties of Law and Politics and Faculties of Islamic Law (Shari’a). Thus Weinbaum’s observations of 1960s and 1970s legal education in Afghanistan remain accurate today:
“Afghan...judges, prosecutors, educators and private attorneys are products of …duality: one group trained in the Sharia tradition, the other graduates of a secular higher education, and neither fully appreciative nor comprehending of the other … Not infrequently, … the division exacerbates intergroup conflicts and perpetuates inequities in the nation’s system of justice e (1980:39-40)
The national system of justice, of course, is still a work in progress, as local policy makers, foreign advisors and politicians struggle to integrate formal, informal, secular, Islamic, customary and donor-designed aspects of the legal system. Whatever the result, Afghanistan’s legal system was, and is, plural. One enduring challenge is that many of the dysfunctional aspects of Afghanistan’s formal legal system, including the bifurcation of legal education, were deliberately designed by successive political regimes – indigenous modernizers assisted by foreign donors, local communists, Soviet occupiers, the Taliban, warring factions of Mujahadeen, and since 2001 the new national government and the Bonn Accord donors - principally the Americans and the Italians. Other contributing factors include the ethnic and tribal allegiances that override formal legal rules. As regimes came and went, very little institution-building and almost no reform took place in Afghanistan’ law schools. The issue now for Afghanistan, its supporters, and its donors is how to regenerate legal education, how to train a new generation of legal professionals, which models of reform to implement, and how. This paper describes the current structure and problems for legal education in Kabul and the provinces of Afghanistan. It reports on the significant reforms carried out since 2001 that impact legal education, including the Afghan Legal Educators’ Project carried out by the University of Washington to retrain law professors in Afghanistan. The paper then lays out a range of options and recommendations for the institutional reform of legal education in Afghanistan, drawing on experiences in Indonesia, Japan and China. At a time when significant development dollars are being spent on retraining the Afghan judiciary, prosecutors and police, this paper advocates for more focus on reforming legal education as a development priority, on the same basis that Weinbaum identified 30 years ago: ‘Obstacles in the legal system to social and economic growth thus lie more in the practices of legal elites than with legal doctrines and judicial structures’ (1980:54) |