Legal Aid Afghanistan's caseload will spike if the country's first elected president makes good on his December post-inauguration promise-a "holy war" against the narcotics industry.
That there is a Legal Aid Afghanistan (LAA)-and that its lawyers have been mentored in the art of questioning authority by Western lawyers-is a miracle worked by the New York-based International Legal Foundation (ILF).
ILF volunteer lawyers, known as fellows, have been coming to Afghanistan for two-month stints (soon to be six) since August 2003 to teach experienced Afghan lawyers-newly-minted public defenders funded by ILF-the myriad Western skills of criminal defense.
But ILF's director worries that the program is in danger of going broke just when it's needed most. In addition to the promised "drug war," the U.S. Department of Defense may soon turn over some detainees to the Afghan government for prosecution.
Criminal defense is not high on the list of nation-builders, asserted Natalie Rea, ILF's unpaid executive director and a staff attorney in the appeals bureau of the Legal Aid Society of New York.
"We learned that the international community never thinks of criminal defense as a natural part of reconstruction-it's an unpleasant constituency," Rea noted. "They think that market forces will fill the void. It's surreal-we're talking about indigents, not Michael Milkens." (Milken, a wealthy former junk bond trader, was convicted of securities fraud in 1990.)
Seven lawyers staff LAA's Kabul office. The Kunduz office in the north has two lawyers and is adding a third. An office will soon open in the southern city of Kandahar. All the lawyers are Afghans who, with the exception of a couple of recent graduates, went to law school before the Russians came in the 1970s.
"People want to pretend that there's nothing here," Rea said when interviewed in December in her New York loft, which doubles as the foundation's office. "But that's not true . . . .There are many judges and prosecutors here who want to do the right thing-to follow the rule of law."
Some of those rules are contained in an interim criminal code that was adopted early last year. It was written primarily by Italian and American officials under the terms of the 2001 Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Re-establishment of Permanent Government Institutions, known as the Bonn agreement. That agreement, among other things, established the mechanisms for dividing up rebuilding roles and regions among the international community.
Rea, now back in Afghanistan, will team with just-arriving ILF fellow Mary McGowan Davis. Davis is a former chief of the appeals division in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York and a former acting justice of the supreme court in Manhattan, a trial-level court. This, her third stint, will end in April.
"We're part of building a country," said Davis, a few days before she left for Afghanistan. She sat behind her desk in a windowless office at Legal Momentum from where, as a visiting attorney, she works on the applicability of international law to domestic courts. Davis' work in Afghanistan has brought her "a new zest. It's tremendous fun-a capable, bright, motivated staff-the roses and the pomegranates outside (the Kabul office)-you don't know what the day will bring," she said. (One day last year brought evacuation from the country for security reasons).
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