Minister calls on donors to coordinate legal reform

The Afghan authorities have called for strengthening of the justice system in Afghanistan saying that more than 50 percent of Afghans do not have access to judicial and legal services in the post-conflict country. Afghan Minister of Justice Ghulam Sarwar Danish, told IRIN on Sunday in the capital Kabul that donors and international organisations had spent millions of dollars on improving the justice sector, but that there had been little tangible sign of improvement. “We need much more coordination, in fact we should be given the chance to prioritise our needs,” he said, adding that many justice reform projects were selected and implemented by international organisations. According to the ministry, a lack of professional staff and buildings for courts, prisons and training facilities were among the chief problems that need to be addressed. “Only 15 of 380 courts have buildings, while we haven’t got buildings for prisons in more than 20 provinces of the country,” Danish added. After three decades of conflict, civil war and rule by the hardline Taliban regime, the legal system in rural areas remains ineffective, or in many places, nonexistent. Even in Kabul, despite the existence of courts and a justice system, people complain of corruption, long delays in cases coming to court, the rule of the gun and general inefficiency in the legal system. “In the central prison of Kabul, we have prisoners who are jailed for many years with no clear sentence, in the women’s prison for example, we have women who are criminals before tradition not the constitution,” a legal expert at the Ministry of Justice told IRIN on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job. Civil servants have told IRIN that legal resources outside the cities were in very short supply. “In fact all the lawyers and judges are in three or four key cities, no one wants to go to rural areas due to insufficient salaries and insecurity,” he said. Danish said his ministry needed over US $100 million to improve provincial and district justice systems in 2005. “We have nearly 5,000 judges in the entire country and we need to double the number and raise their capacities to meet our most urgent needs,” he said. Italy is the lead nation in supporting the Afghan justice sector. Rome has made a 22 million euros ($28.5 million) contribution to improving the system over the last three years. Meanwhile, according to officials at the Italian Embassy, Canada has allocated $5 million for training in the legal system this year. “The contributions are big sums but little compared to the vastness of the task,” Ambassador Jolanda Brunettigoetz, the government of Italy’s special coordinator for the justice sector in Afghanistan, told IRIN. She called on all donors and international organisations to coordinate activities in improving the justice sector in the country. “The concern is that there should be more cohesion among donors in order to create a system of rule of law. We need to know what the others are doing,” she said.