To develop judicial capacity in Parwan and beyond, the United States has helped train a slew of Afghan judges and lawyers, aiming to develop institutions that have long languished because of political gridlock and a lack of funding.
Efforts to address the shortcomings of the legal code in parliament or through a presidential decree have stalled, even though some of the country’s top legal advisers acknowledge the need for reform.
Some Afghans, including Karzai, remain eager to expedite the transition process at Parwan and could still push for an earlier transfer than 2014. But U.S. officials say significant reforms would have to be in place before such a handover could occur.
Other missed deadlines
This is not the first time the United States has missed a deadline related to Parwan’s transition. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, pledged in June 2010 that U.S. forces would “hand over all detention operations” at Parwan to Afghans by January 2011.
But the transfer of judicial operations has proven even more challenging. Top Afghan and American officials agreed in a public memorandum last year that Afghans should expect to assume responsibility for Parwan’s courts as well as its security in January 2012, with the caveat that the timeline was subject to “demonstrated capacity.” In retrospect, U.S. officials said, that transition date was also too ambitious.
News that the country’s largest prison will remain in American hands until at least 2014 has been bitterly received by some.
“This is our country. We have our own laws. The process at Parwan should be an Afghan process,” said Fareed Ahmad Najeebi, the Justice Ministry’s spokesman. “We might have some technical problems with our penal code, but we’re ready to take over judicial and detention operations.”
The Afghan-run court at Parwan is growing, albeit slowly, and is now hearing about 50 cases a month. Despite its flaws, it marks a significant improvement over the rest of the country’s courts. About 150 of Afghanistan’s 398 districts lack judges, and threats and bribes lead to the manipulation of verdicts in many courts.
Among the Afghan proposals to reform the legal system is the development of a national security court that would adopt the U.S. practice of detaining suspected insurgents indefinitely without trial.
U.S. and Afghan officials say the legal basis for continuing the detentions derives from a provision of the Geneva Conventions that allows combatants to be held without trial, as long as standards of review and humane treatment are met. The advocacy group Human Rights First argued in a report published this year that Parwan’s U.S.-military-run detainee review board “fails to provide detainees with an adequate opportunity to defend themselves against charges that they are collaborating with insurgents and present a threat to U.S. forces.” U.S. officials reject that assertion.
Earlier this month, during a typical review board hearing — which includes no lawyers or judges — three U.S. military officers sat in front of a slim, bearded detainee who pleaded with cuffed hands for mercy.
“I am not Taliban,” he said in his native Pashto. “I am a farmer. This is all a mistake.”
But the officers were looking at classified intelligence that said otherwise, labeling the man a “Taliban facilitator” from Kandahar. Now the board had to decide: Could an Afghan court be trusted to handle his case, or would he be detained without a trial?
Because the evidence is largely classified, the three officers said they could not risk handing him over to local judges.
The suspect was escorted to a wheelchair used to transport detainees and pushed back to his cell. He will be questioned by another review board in six months, and the decision will be reassessed.
Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
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