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“YOU’VE ALWAYS GOT TO BE ON YOUR GUARD IN A PLACE LIKE KABUL,” SAID DR PHILLIP TAHMINDJIS IN AN INTERVIEW WITH THE LAW COUNCIL REVIEW.
Following the fall of Kabul in November 2001, Dr Tahmindjis had a job come across his desk at the International Bar Association (IBA) that would have a profound eff ect on his career: he was asked to establish a bar association in the highly combustible war-zone that Afghanistan had become. “In Kabul you’ve got to be really careful—you never walk anywhere. You always take a car—even if you’re just going around the corner. You wind all the windows up and you lock all the doors. You don’t come and go at regular times—you stagger the times.”
As Director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, Dr Tahmindjis’ assignment to Afghanistan stands out in an enviable list of achievements. In his relatively short tenure with the IBA, he has also travelled to Swaziland to assist its local law society in capacity building; has trained lawyers in Iraq and Palestine in human rights; has trained lawyers in the former Yugoslavia in humanitarian law; has undertaken rule of law missions to Russia and Nepal; and has established global guidelines for human rights fact fi nding.
He is currently working on a project examining economic and social rights—a study he said was a world fi rst. “What we have started this year is a taskforce looking at illicit fi nancial fl ows and the impact this has on poverty by funneling money away from governments that might otherwise be used for welfare,” Dr Tahmindjis said. “We’ll be producing a report with recommendations on this issue in about 12 months and from then on will decide the next stage of the program.”
Human rights was not always an obvious career path for Dr Tahmindjis. He was admitted to the bar of New South Wales in 1978, but in the same year successfully applied for a teaching role at the Queensland Institute of Technology (QIT) (now the Queensland University of Technology (QUT)) where he went on to become the Head of the School of Law. He was also a legal consultant to the federal Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Commission from 1989 to 1997 and was a Member of the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Tribunal.
Dr Tahmindjis was recently awarded the Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his work within the international legal community. He was nominated by the Former Justice of the High Court of Australia, the Hon. Michael Kirby AC CMG, who described Dr Tahmindjis as “an outstanding human rights lawyer.”
Dr Tahmindjis spoke with the Law Council Review from his base in London about his career in the Australian legal profession, his role in establishing a bar association in Afghanistan and what the future holds for human rights in Australia and the globe.
Why did you decide to take on a career in the legal profession?
It was largely an elimination of other things. I was never particularly fond of or good at maths and science in school and that cut out a lot of options I could pursue at university. The options boiled down to things like economics, arts and law, and so I ended up doing a combined Arts/
MAR–MAY 2012
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