Kimberley Motley, an American lawyer, writes of the case of Gulnaz, the woman jailed for adultery after being raped - and, more broadly, of the plight of other Afghan women in prison for so-called moral crimes:
After years of advocacy by human rights groups and other activists, and a decade of war by the United States and its allies - a war in which the need to uphold the rights of women has often been invoked - Afghan women remain trapped in a legal system that often punishes them for being the victims of brutal crimes.
My illiterate client told me of her experience [of] going to court with her illegitimate daughter and not understanding the legal process. She was forced to represent herself after her Afghan lawyer failed to show up, yet the judges who presided over the case refused to allow her to speak. Instead, they berated Gulnaz for lying, insisting that women cannot get pregnant by having sex just once. This assertion was the basis for the 12-year sentence that was imposed, with a wrenching caveat: Marrying her attacker would allow her to be "free."
Unfortunately, Gulnaz's case is not an anomaly but represents the situation that more than half of the imprisoned women in Afghanistan find themselves in - locked up for moral crimes, according to a recent study by the United Nations.
.....
Rule-of-law initiatives, particularly on women's rights, have a better chance of success if the international community exercises more oversight and makes a greater effort to understand how the Afghan justice system really works. At present, I am the only Western lawyer in Afghanistan taking on such cases.
Here.
