Dr Phillip Tahmindjis


lying on the tarmac. The roads had huge potholes in them and there were no big hotels—you had to stay in small guesthouses.


We started Neil’s work there—I stayed with him for about the fi rst week and a half - and paid courtesy calls on the relevant stakeholders, in particular the Ministry of Justice. The Deputy Minister of Justice was very interested that we had come and was very supportive of the project, which was a big step forward. Because there had never been a bar association we had to convince everybody that this would be a good idea—including members of the legal profession. There was very little private practice in Kabul or anywhere in Afghanistan. There was the university which trained people for law degrees - there was a civil law faculty and a sharia law faculty. But most lawyers went into the civil service: they were lawyers with the Attorney-General’s offi ce and with the Ministry of Justice. There was a lawyers union but it acted like a trade union. It was more interested in things like working conditions and salaries. It had never dealt with such things as setting ethical standards for the profession; providing continuing legal education; or disciplining breaches of ethics—this had never been done before.


We had originally considered using this lawyers union as the basis of a new bar association but decided this wasn’t going to work and that we would have to set up something from scratch. It took a couple of years to convince everybody that this was a good idea. The breakthrough came years later in 2005 when Neil’s successor, a young Italian lawyer named Liliana DeMarco, decided to run a seminar in Kabul about bar associations and what they should be doing. What we did was run this seminar with stakeholders from the government but we also invited as many of the lawyers in Kabul as we could fi nd - there were about 120 of them. We had a day-long seminar and spoke in the morning about what bar associations can do and how other Islamic countries have bar associations to show that this wasn’t just a western concept and that it could work in an Islamic context. In the afternoon we divided the participants into discussion groups to talk about specifi c issues such as whether the bar should be responsible for discipline; should it run continuing professional education; should there be ethical standards; who should be members of the bar association? Those small groups reported their fi ndings to the plenary which discussed their


conclusions and this was the big breakthrough—if there was any single tipping point in this project that was it. For the fi rst time the Afghans were asked what they thought and what they considered they needed, rather than having a foreign organisation come to Afghanistan to tell them what they were going to be given. This gave them ownership of the idea and that turned attitudes around and it was from that time onwards that there was support to have a bar association.


There were many other issues, such as translation: translating concepts like a bar association into Dari and into Pashto [the native languages spoken in Afghanistan] was diffi cult. You would try to translate it and when it was re-translated into English the phrase would be something like ‘the Association of Criminal Lawyers’.


This was because private lawyers ran criminal practices, there was no commercial practice in those days in Afghanistan. We needed to develop a glossary of terms because the bar association was meant to encapsulate not just criminal practice but all sorts of practice which we knew would develop and have developed since that time.


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