I Was Afghanistan’s Attorney General. Here Is What Justice Looked Like — and What Destroyed It

(Mohammad Farid Hamidi – Just Security) United Nations Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett recently noted to the U.N.’s annual Commission on the Status of Women meeting in New York that Afghanistan today has no women working as lawyers, including as judges or prosecutors. This was not the Afghanistan I knew five years ago. I should know, I was its attorney general. When I took office in 2016, the prosecution system I inherited employed 6,000 people. Fewer than 3 percent were women. By the time the United States withdrew in 2021, that figure had reached 23 percent. Through U.S.-funded rule-of-law programs via the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), we trained 250 female prosecutors and integrated them into every level of the justice system — from Kabul to provincial offices that had never seen a woman behind a prosecutor’s desk. As these professional women entered the system, something measurable happened. The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) documented a significant increase in the number of cases registered by police, prosecutors, and courts across multiple provinces alleging violence against women. Women were coming forward to report crimes they had always experienced but never reported. UNAMA attributed the increase directly to Afghan women’s growing demands for justice — they were not coming forward because violence had increased but because, for the first time, they believed the system might listen. Post-Taliban Afghanistan at the time already had established laws and policies focused on protection and justice for women and children, including specialized legal frameworks, family police units, specifically assigned prosecutors and special courts. But the element that had been lacking for female victims was just one thing: someone in the room who shared their experience. When women prosecutors were present, women came forward. The connection was that direct. – Afghanistan’s Ex-Attorney General on What Justice Looks Like