The International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul University will participate in a 16-month program designed to help Afghanistan rebuild its justice system. The Afghanistan Judicial Reform Project will train 450 judges, most of them newly appointed and 50 of whom are women. The IHRLI will help provide instruction in criminal justice and human rights as part of the program.

Under the terms of the Bonn Agreement of December 2002, which was designed to map Afghanistan’s reconstruction and includes agreements on such issues as an interim power sharing, the creation of a new constitution and elections in 2004, Italy assumed responsibility for rebuilding the judiciary and supporting the restructuring of the legal system in Afghanistan.

To accomplish this, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs contracted with the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) of Rome and the International Institute of Higher Studies in Criminal Sciences (ISISC) of Siracusa, Italy, to organize and provide judicial training in Afghanistan. The IDLO will provide training in civil and commercial law while ISISC will assume responsibility for training in criminal justice and human rights.

The IHRLI will work in concert with ISISC by recruiting the trainers for the program. “This program will furnish those in a position to shape the new judicial framework in Afghanistan with intense and expansive knowledge of human rights law,” said M. Cherif Bassiouni who is president of IHRLI and ISISC, a law professor at DePaul’s College of Law and an internationally recognized authority on human rights law. “By recruiting those who will provide the training, the IHRLI will help ensure that the program provides instruction of the highest quality.”

The training will consist of courses held over 16 months in a special facility in Kabul, with newly-built conference rooms and administrative facilities. The judges attending the training courses will be in groups of 30 to maximize interaction between the participants and the lecturers.

Forty subjects, including human rights and comparative law, will be covered during the program. The courses will be divided into two-and-a-half-day sessions so that each group of 30 judges will attend a two-and-a-half-day session every four days, which minimizes the time they will be absent from their official duties.

The 450 participating judges, who were selected by the Supreme Court of Afghanistan, are equally divided between those from Kabul and those from outside the capital. The 50 female judges selected for the program represent the largest number of women judges appointed in any Muslim country.

The program officially was launched in late July in Kabul with a formal ceremony that included such dignitaries as Afghanistan’s ministers of justice and foreign affairs, the chairman of the Judicial Reform Commission, the deputy chief justice of the Supreme Court and Lakhdar Brahimi, the representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations.