Afghan Judge Fled Country With Most Prized Possession Sewn Into Her Dress: Her Law Degree

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Fawzia Amini was a senior judge on Afghanistan’s Supreme Court, where she headed the Elimination of Violence Against Women Court. But then, last year, the Taliban took over Kabul. That’s when everything changed.

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The court where Amini worked was closed, and she told CNN her bank account was frozen.

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That’s when she began to plot her escape from Afghanistan:

“We worried about everything — our situation, our lives, and our security especially,” she told CNN in an interview from west London, where she now lives in temporary accommodation with her husband and four daughters.

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As she planned to flee the country, sewn into her dress was none other than her law degree.

Though Amini was fortunate to leave the country, there are still ~80 female judges in Afghanistan — and their lives are still in danger:

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The same documents [her law degree] mean nothing now for her colleagues stuck in Afghanistan, some of whom have gone into hiding. Amina’s friend, Samira, who served on the same court prosecuting violence against women, said she is among about 80 female judges still remaining in the country.

“Now I live like a prisoner,” Samira, whose full name has been withheld to protect her safety, told CNN in a Skype interview. “They (the Taliban) stole my life.”

Closing the Violence Against Women Court hasn’t been the only roll back of women’s rights since the Taliban returned to power last August:

Over the past year, the Taliban’s leaders have banned girls from high school and blocked women from most workplaces. They’ve stopped women from taking long-distance road trips on their own, requiring that a male relative accompany them for any distance beyond 45 miles.

New guidelines to broadcasters prohibit all dramas, soap operas and entertainment shows from featuring women, and female news presenters have been ordered to wear headscarves on screen. And, in their latest decree, the Taliban ordered women to cover their faces in public, ideally by wearing a burqa.

And by banishing women from the judiciary, the Taliban have effectively denied them the right to legal recourse to remedy any of these infringements. It has left women and girls with nowhere to turn in a system that enshrines a hardline Islamic interpretation of patriarchal rule, Amini explained.

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All of which prompted Amini’s decision to leave with her family. The trip began with a bus ride from Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif. From there, she was able to board a plane chartered by British lawyer Baroness Helena Kennedy, meant for female members of the judiciary.

Kennedy worked with many members of the Afghanistan legal community when she went to the country to work on setting up a bar association. It was through those connections that Kennedy began the work of organizing the evacuation of those at risk:

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“It started with receiving really tragic and, and passionate messages on my iPhone,” she said. “Messages from people saying, ‘Please, please help me. I’m hiding in my basement. Already, I’ve received messages of threat. Already, there is a target on my back.'”

Determined to help, Kennedy, along with the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, raised money for evacuations via a GoFundMe page and charitable donations from philanthropists. Over the course of several weeks, Kennedy says, the team chartered three separate planes that got 103 women, most of them judges, and their families out of Afghanistan.

Now the task is working through the asylum process for those who made it out of Afghanistan. Which is proving particularly challenging:

“I had imagined that the world would have opened its arms and said ‘bring me these incredibly courageous women.’ But then my second set of problems arose because we had great difficulty finding places to resettle the women,” said Kennedy.

For her part, Amini is working to learn English, and she hopes to continue her legal work in the UK. And her daughters are able to attend school, a clear distinction compared with the situation in their native country. But the loss of the dream of a better Afghanistan weighs heavily on Amini, “We had a dream for a new Afghanistan. We wanted to change our lives, we wanted to change everything. Now we have lost our hopes for our country. Everything has stopped.”

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Topics

Afghanistan, Courts, Fawzia Amini, Helena Kennedy, International Law, The Jabot