Background of the ILF’s Involvement

The ILF began working with the Afghan refugee legal community in 2000 in Peshawar, Pakistan where it set up an educational program at the Afghan University. That summer, a member of the ILF traveled to Pakistan to investigate the need for, and feasibility of, a justice-related project for the Afghan refugee community in Peshawar. The dean of the Law School was enthusiastic about having American lawyers and law professors teach a course at his university, and with his assistance, the International Law Project began. Its first seminar, held in the fall of 2000, focused on international conventions regarding refugees, women and children, and compared the Universal Declaration on Human Rights with the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. The second seminar, held in the spring of 2001, focused on customary international law, international jurisdiction and the International Criminal Court of Justice. Over one hundred people attended these seminars, including refugee law students, refugee lawyers and refugee judges, as well as faculty members and other professionals and the discussions focused primarily on the impact of international law on the rebuilding of Afghanistan.

The goal of the project was to make the refugees in attendance aware of recent developments in international law so that when they returned to Afghanistan they could, if they wanted to, adapt their legal system to international standards. When the program began in the summer of 2000, the rebuilding of Afghanistan seemed very distant. Following the fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001, the Afghans who attended the seminars returned to Afghanistan, and as a result, the ILF was particularly well-situated to assist them.
In November 2001, the ILF undertook a survey of the customary laws of Afghanistan to determine whether there was a custom of representation. The survey of, and report on, the customary laws of Afghanistan is published on the ILF's website: [Download CUSTOMARY LAWS OF AFGHANISTAN in English]

Having determined that Afghanistan had a custom of representation, the ILF approached the Minister of Justice and the first Judicial Reform Commission and offered to assist in the establishment of a public defender system. The ILF opened its first ILF-Afghanistan office in Kabul (formerly known as Legal Aid Afghanistan) in August 2003.

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