Then we had to assist with drafting the enabling legislation to get the bar established as a legal entity and this took a couple of years more work. We worked very closely with the Ministry’s drafting section and after a lot of debate and many meetings we fi nally settled on the draft. This draft then had to go to Parliament, which by this stage was in operation. We had to convince the Parliament that a bar


association was a good idea, given that it had a lot of legislation to consider including re-drafting the Criminal Code and drafting a


Banking Act for the fi rst time. There were major legislative issues before Parliament at the time. In addition, in the Upper House, many parliamentarians were former


warlords for whom the idea of a bar association was not something that was uppermost on their legislative agenda.


By that stage we had our third


consultant in place, a young English lawyer named Alex Wilks. He had a lot of experience in parliamentary lobbying to get legislation passed. What he did was focus on infl uential individual members of Parliament to convince them that the bar association would be a good idea: that it would be an easy thing to pass; that it was not a particularly complicated piece of legislation; and that it was not controversial.


This was successful and the law was the second ever passed by the new Parliament. Then, in Afghan tradition, passing the legislation alone isn’t enough - there must be a meeting of stakeholders to agree to it. So we then had to run, in eff ect, the fi rst annual general meeting of the bar in Afghanistan, where registered members would approve the bylaws that had been written under the aegis of


legislation and to elect the fi rst president, executive committee and so forth.


About 400 lawyers from across Afghanistan attended that fi rst annual general meeting. This happened in 2008 and it was the offi cial start of the Afghanistan Independent Bar Association.


Two things that are signifi cant about the bylaws involve the position of women in the bar


association and pro bono work. The


bylaws of the Afghan Independent Bar Association state that of the two vice presidents of the bar, at least one must be a woman and that in the executive committee there are a minimum number of positions reserved for women. With respect to pro bono work, there is a


requirement in the bylaws that, to be eligible for re-registration each year, attorneys have to show that they have undertaken at least three cases pro bono in the previous year. This is a tremendous concession when you consider that lawyers in Afghanistan are not wealthy.


The task since 2008 has been to further facilitate the bar to grow. There are now about 1500


registered lawyers in Afghanistan which represents tremendous growth from the 400 that were registered in 2008.


Given the continuing instability Afghanistan is facing, how do you envisage the development of the Afghan Independent Bar


Association? Is it still a project the IBA is intrinsically linked with?


Yes, it’s something the IBA will always be involved with because the Afghan Independent Bar


Association is now a member in its own right of the IBA. In the shorter term the IBA’s Human Rights


Institute will be there to give it the extra help it is going to need


because sustainability is essential - we don’t want to set something up and have it fail. In the context of a place like Afghanistan, it’s very much a matter of attitude and hearts and minds—the best way to ensure that it will be sustainable is that its own members, those in the legal profession, believe in it.


You’ve had what many would describe as an amazing career in the legal profession to date. Beyond your work in Australia, with the IBA and in Afghanistan, you’ve also worked in capacity building for the Law Society of Swaziland, human rights training for lawyers in Iraq and Palestine, humanitarian law training in the former Yugoslavia and rule of law missions to Russia and Nepal. If you had to sum it up succinctly, what has life in the legal profession given you?


It has certainly taken me to places I would otherwise have never visited.


I doubt I would have ever holidayed in Afghanistan, Swaziland or Pakistan.


In that regard I’ve been incredibly privileged to have been able to go to all of these places I otherwise would not have seen.


I’m also privileged to be doing something that I believe in and that gives me a lot of satisfaction. In more general terms training as a lawyer helps you to think in logical ways and in an ordered fashion. Thinking like a lawyer helps you focus on what the real issues are. That ability, whether it’s in the law or in general, is a great skill and I feel privileged to have been taught that.


What’s the most important thing your life in law has taught you?


That people are important: it is not just the words on paper but it’s the way the words are put into practice because they are meant to help people; they are meant to enable us to get on with each other.


Also, in the travelling I have done that has been related to the rule of law, you talk to diff erent people from diff erent cultures and from diff erent classes, and what strikes you is not the diff erences but the similarities: people just want to be able to live a reasonable and safe life. They want to be able to live without confl ict going on around them. That is common throughout the world and I suppose what it has taught me is not the diff erences but the similarities that we all share.


What do you hope your legacy in the legal profession will one day read?


Hopefully, being able to make people think about and appreciate and apply human rights—not just in the law but in their everyday lives to make people realise these are not theoretical constructs but guidelines about how we should always work and live.


29


MAR–MAY 2012


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