Fieldnotes on Humanity

------- It was expected that the result of the last appeal court would be acquittal for Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, but against all expectations the judge of the court sentenced him for 20-years in prison. This sentence was issued but the court didn’t mention directly the accusation of distributing an article on women's rights on the Internet which was said to be blasphemous. Seyed Parwiz Kambakhsh, arrested a year ago, was first sentenced to death by a court in Balkh. The interesting point for the last trial was the statement of the Balkh University teachers, as witnesses telling to the court that “Parwiz Kambakhsh was trying to disturb the lessons in the class, by questioning about Islam”. His friends have been denying about the supposedly blasphemous article and its distribution by Kambakhsh, but one of his classmates told the court that he had seen the blasphemous article with Kambaksh. Regarding the witnesses at the last trial and the long term delay by the courtjudge, the judge n...

------ The current controversy over the Juvenile Delinquency law illustrates the conflicts within the Afghan legal system. The conflicts are rooted in Afghan history itself. "From the 1880's until the 1960's, Afghanistan essentially had a dual judicial system. A system of sharia courts headed by clergy handled areas ... such as criminal law, family and personal law laid down in the sharia. A separate system of government courts handled state law issues, such as those relating to commerce, taxation, and civil servants." In 1964, an Afghan constitution, ratified by the Loya Jirga attempted to bring those threads closer together, but it was ripped apart again in the period of war with the Soviet Union and during the rule of the Taliban. Following the defeat of the Taliban at the hands of US forces in 2002, an international conference in Bonn stipulated the appointment of a "Judicial Commission" whose role was to "to rebuild the domestic justice system in a...