Afghanistan emerged from Taliban rule in 2001 as an institutional wasteland. The justice deficit was acute, making the country a test case for law-based nation-building. Ever since, IDLO has been working with the Afghan government to drive judicial reform and foster the rule of law. And as Afghanistan takes charge of its own future, IDLO has been stepping up efforts to expand legal capacity and promote human rights. Advancing legal protection for women and combating gender violence have been among our priorities. IDLO has helped create an infrastructure of legal aid to victims, while supporting the prosecution of crimes against women and girls.
But Afghanistan remains a brittle post-conflict society. We have trained Afghan public defenders, empowered the poor to seek legal aid, and helped build legal resources in most of the country’s provinces. We have developed legal textbooks, reconstituted an entire pre-war body of lost law, and contributed to the establishment of a law library at the University of Kabul. Thousands of Afghan legal professionals – judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, MPs, civil servants and academics – are benefiting from this knowledge transfer.
Afghanistan has been an IDLO member party since November 2012.
The weight of custom and the failings of the formal justice system mean most Afghans only access justice via informal dispute resolution mechanisms. With this in mind, IDLO has been assisting informal justice actors to perform their duties within basic legal standards and a human-rights positive framework.
The letter that was sent by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, with relation to the International Development Law Organization (IDLO), contains a number of factual errors and speculative assertions based on incorrect or incomplete information.
IDLO has over 30 years of experience in providing legal training for more than 25,000 people in the developing world, and has been working in Afghanistan since 2002. As an inter-governmental organisation, Afghanistan is also a member state of IDLO and this relationship further strengthens our engagement and effectiveness with local authorities and partners.
The US State Department has strongly defended IDLO’s record in Afghanistan. The comments came in response to allegations by the monitoring agency, SIGAR, that more than $47 million in funds allocated to IDLO for judicial training in Afghanistan lacked proper oversight.
One of the most vital components of IDLO’s judicial training program in Afghanistan is well underway, with dozens of legal professionals -- 12 percent of them female – receiving intensive training in the fight against money-laundering. Attendees include judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and Criminal Investigation Department officers.
(New York) March 18, 2014 – Fundamental justice for the women of Afghanistan will only come from increased participation in their country’s justice sector, a report released today by the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) shows.
 Reflections From The Field
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