[They fear that they or their loved
ones could be tracked down and killed because of their work delivering justice
to women. “We have lost everything — our jobs, our homes, the way we lived.”]
In mid-August, as the Taliban
poured into Kabul and seized power, hundreds of prisoners
were set free. Men once sentenced in Nabila’s courtroom were among them,
according to the judge. Like the other women interviewed for this article, her
full name has been withheld for her protection.
Within days, Nabila said, she began
receiving death threat calls from former prisoners. She moved out of her house
in Kabul and went into hiding as she sought ways to leave Afghanistan with her
husband and three young daughters.
“I lost my job and now I can’t even
go outside or do anything freely because I fear these freed prisoners,” Nabila
said by phone from a safe house. “A dark future is awaiting everyone in
Afghanistan, especially female judges.”
More than 200 female judges remain
in Afghanistan, many of them under threat and in hiding, according to the
International Association of Women Judges. Taliban officials have recovered
their personal information from court records, several former judges said, and
some have had their bank accounts frozen.
“They are women who had the
effrontery to sit in judgment on men,” said Susan Glazebrook, president of the
judges’ association and a justice of the Supreme Court in New Zealand.
“The women judges of Afghanistan
are under threat for applying the law,” she added. “They are under threat
because they have made rulings in favor of women according to law in family
violence, custody and divorce cases.”
The plight of female judges and
lawyers is one more example of the Taliban’s systematic unraveling of gains
made by women over the past two decades. Female judges and lawyers
have left the courts under Taliban pressure, abruptly erasing one of the signal
achievements of the United States and allied nations since 2001.
The women have not only lost their
jobs, but also live in a state of perpetual fear that they or their loved ones
could be tracked down and killed.
“Afghanistan is an open-air prison
for these women,” said Kimberley Motley, an American lawyer who has worked
in Afghanistan for several years. She said she is representing 13
female lawyers and judges who are trying to leave the country.
A Taliban spokesman, Bilal Karimi,
said no decision had been made about a future role for female judges and
lawyers.
“Right now, they are on hold,” Mr.
Karimi said.
But the judges and lawyers say they
have been effectively fired because it is too dangerous for them to continue
their work, given the Taliban’s disapproval of women who sit in judgment of
men.
“Women judging men is anathema to
the Taliban,” Justice Glazebrook said.
Before the Taliban takeover, more
than 270 female judges served in Afghanistan’s corrupt, male-dominated justice
system. Special courts with female judges, along with special police units and
prosecution offices, were set up in many places to handle cases of violence
against women. A little more than a decade ago, nearly
90 percent of women experienced some form of domestic abuse in their
lifetime, according to a 2008 study by the United States Institute of Peace.
These judges helped to bring some
reform to many courts, particularly in urban areas, delivering justice to
growing numbers of women and girls beaten and abused by husbands or male
relatives.
The women defied a legal system
that favored husbands, granting divorces to Afghan wives who in many cases
would previously have been doomed to stay in abusive marriages. Among those now
in hiding are former lawyers and judges who defended abused women or pursued
cases against men accused of beating, kidnapping or raping women and girls.
Now many former judges and lawyers
said their relatives or neighbors have been beaten or accosted by men demanding
to know the women’s whereabouts.
“We have lost everything — our
jobs, our homes, the way we lived — and we are terrified,” said Wahida, 28, a
former judge.
Behista, 25, a former defense
lawyer who represented victims of domestic abuse, said she had not left her
home in Kabul since the Taliban
takeover on Aug. 15. She is trying to leave Afghanistan with her
mother and two brothers, one of them a former government soldier, she said.
“I lost my job, and now my whole
family is at risk, not just me,” Behista said.
Nabila said she continued to
receive threats even after replacing the SIM card in her cellphone.
Even before the Taliban takeover,
female judges and lawyers were sometimes threatened or attacked. In January,
two female judges on the Afghan Supreme Court were shot and killed on their way to work in Kabul.
Male judges and police officers
often resisted reforms to the justice system, and pressured women to rescind
their complaints from the court. A Human Rights Watch report released in August said the
system had failed to provide accountability for violence against women and
girls and had undermined progress to protect women’s rights.
The report said landmark
legislation passed in 2009, the Elimination of Violence Against Women law, was often sabotaged
by male officials despite some progress in bringing justice to victims under
the law.
Now, many female former judges and
lawyers who were responsible for this progress are not able to evacuate because
they do not have national ID cards or passports, said Ms. Motley, the American
lawyer. According to the World
Bank, more than half of all Afghan women lack national ID cards compared
with about 6 percent of men. And for many of the women who do have documents,
theirs efforts to escape are complicated by a husband or child who does not.
To assist Afghan women, Ms. Motley
suggested reviving Nansen Passports, first issued in 1922 to refugees and
stateless people after World War I and the Russian Revolution.
Some female judges and lawyers have
managed to escape Afghanistan. Polish authorities recently helped 20 women and
their families leave, Justice Glazebrook said, and 24 female judges have been
evacuated to Greece since August, according to the Greek foreign ministry.
Friba, 40, was an appeals court
judge from Mazar-i-Sharif, a city in Afghanistan’s north, before she fled to
Greece. She has convicted numerous men for domestic violence and also presided
over the trial of two Taliban members found guilty for the November
2016 suicide bomb attack on the German consulate.
“I was getting threats for the past
five years,” Friba said.
In 2014, she secured a divorce for
her sister who had been forced to marry a Talib at age 17 under the movement’s
first regime. Her sister has since fled to Egypt with their three children. “He
is still after her,” she said.
Mr. Karimi, a member of the Taliban
cultural commission, denied that the former judges and lawyers were at risk. He
said they were covered by a general amnesty for all Afghans who served the
previous government.
“To those people who are living in
hiding: We are telling them that they should feel free, we won’t do anything to
you,” Mr. Karimi said. “It’s their own country. They can live very freely and
easily.”
Justice Glazebrook rejected this.
“These women believed in their
country, believed in human rights and believed in the importance of the rule of
law and their duty to uphold it,” she said.
As a result, she said, “They are at
risk of losing their lives.”