|
KABUL, Afghanistan -- On a recent Tuesday morning, Ahmad Kazim, a29-year-old Iranian, found himself sitting in a suspect box in awhite-walled room, awaiting a trial for drug trafficking. Three months ago, Kazim was busted driving across the border fromwestern Afghanistan to Iran, in a car stuffed with more than 28kilos of opium. Kazim says he had no idea it was in there: A friendhad asked him to drive some bags of rice across and he neverinspected the packages. Prosecutors said the drugs were concealedin dozens of small canisters throughout the car, indicating obviousplanning. Because the contraband weighed more than 10 kilos, Afghan lawmandated that Kazim's case be transferred across the country to theonly court in the nation that deals with major narcotics cases, theU.S.-funded Counter-Narcotics Tribunal, in Kabul. "I don't feel good," he told The Huffington Post from his seat inthe courtroom. He looked to the sky and offered a meek smile. "OnlyGod knows what will happen to me today." Predicting Kazim's fate, however, was much simpler than that.Internal records show that nearly 98 percent of defendants at thiscourt are convicted. For the next 40 minutes, the judge discussed the facts of the casewith the prosecutor, who read out a sheet of charges, and a privatedefense attorney, who offered a counter-narrative and pleaded forleniency from the court. No evidence was introduced, no witnesseswere called, and Kazim, who spent the whole trial sittingshell-shocked, was never invited to speak. Then, the courtadjourned. Fifteen minutes later, word trickled out to the defense lawyer andKazim's brother, waiting in the hallway: Kazim had been foundguilty. He would spend the next 17 years in the feared Pul-e Charkhi prison in eastern Kabul. This is justice at the Counter-Narcotics Tribunal, part ofAfghanistan's newest and most modernized law-and-order facility,the $11 million Counter-Narcotics Justice Center (CNJC), on the edge of town.Dreamt up and financially supported by the Americans and Brits --although technically it is now "Afghan-led," a term that currentlyencompasses a wide range of actual responsibility and authorityhere -- the center was designed to handle every aspect of theinvestigation, detention and prosecution of major drug crimes, andthus circumvent Afghanistan's notoriously corrupt and leakyjudicial system. According to the U.N ., the vast majority of the world's opium, the main component ofheroin, is derived from Afghanistan, and American militaryofficials have deemed counteracting it a major strategic imperativeof the mission. But in the seven years since the counter-narcotics court startedoperating with U.S. support, its results have been deeply mixed.Afghan and Western officials proudly point out that thanks to thetribunal's "robust" handling of the law, the CNJC has sent hundredsof drug traffickers to prison, mainly to Pul-e Charkhi, and hasdone so with almost no hint of corruption or malfeasance. "This center is the one place in Afghanistan where there is nohanky panky," said Ahmad Khalid Mowahid, the spokesman for thecourt. "Everything is transparent and honest." Indeed, the strict rules of the legal process for drug crimes offerlittle room for improvisation: Any person who is arrested with morethan 2 kg of heroin, 10 kg of opium, or 50 kg of hashish must besent to the CNJC in Kabul for investigation. Prison terms arenearly as inflexible: Almost everyone gets between 15 and 20 years,although judges can grant reductions if the defendant providesinformation that leads to further arrests. But over the past few years, defense lawyers and even some Americanofficials say that the high percentage of defendants found guiltyis becoming unnerving. The conviction rate for drug offenses in the American judicialsystem is also very high -- 93 percent for federal cases in 2006 -- but that is largelyowing to plea bargains (typically about 90 percent of allconvictions) and the ability of state and district attorneys to usediscretion to drop cases that don't merit prosecution. Judges alsoregularly grant reduced sentences to lesser offenders. However, in a system where there is virtually no leeway for policeor prosecutors to drop cases that are too small or poorlyevidenced, defense attorneys say the high conviction rate meansthat just about every suspect who arrives at the court ends up inprison for a long time. "The conviction rate is absurd," said Kim Motley, an Americandefense lawyer who several years ago started a second career defending foreigners from specious charges in Afghan courts. "That court is not on theup and up." According to data produced by the CNJC, in the most recent Persiancalendar year (March 2011 to March 2012) the center received 817suspects and sent 788 defendants to trial. Of those, 768 wereconvicted (97.5 percent) and 20 were acquitted "due to a lack ofevidence." Twenty more were released by an appeals court. The numbers for the year before were very similar: The center saw631 suspects, sent 649 defendants to trial (new defendants areoften added in the course of the investigations), and 621 of thosedefendants were convicted (95.6 percent). Twenty-eight wereacquitted in the primary court, and another 20 in the appealscourt. "Everyone is afraid of being accused of being corrupt, so they justpass the cases along," said one American adviser who is familiarwith the CNJC's workings and asked to remain anonymous. He concededthat the conviction rate was "very high." "We're working with the Afghans on that," he added. U.S. State Department and Department of Justice officials declinednumerous requests over the past two weeks to make an officialavailable to discuss the CNJC. But in response to writtenquestions, a U.S. Embassy official defended the criminal justicesystem, saying that public trials are usually just the last step inan investigative process that involves close review of an evidencefile by the judges. "We will not comment about the conviction rate statistics," theofficial's statement added. But Motley says that while defendants do have certain rights -- tospeak in court, to demand that evidence or witnesses be produced --the defendants and their lawyers rarely seem to be aware of this. "Afghan lawyers usually don't do that because they don't know toexercise these rights," she said. "What you'll usually see in courtis the defense attorney talking to prosecutors about minimizingsentencing, not actually investigating. You'll be lucky if you seeeverybody has a defense attorney -- more often, it's five peoplewith one defense attorney, not five people with five attorneys." The Department of Justice has a program at the CNJC to mentor theprosecutors and judges, but there is no equivalent one for defenseattorneys, officials say. "DOJ is fully supportive of a competent, committed defense bar,"the embassy official wrote. "DOJ has helped those who are advisingthe defense bar with materials and advice." But the official alsoacknowledged that the department's "primary role" is "the educationand the development of the skills of the prosecution service inAfghanistan." Meanwhile, despite a handful of major busts and high profile cases,the CNJC appears to handle mostly smaller-scale cases -- and thereare no provisions in the law to allow the expediting of majorcases, or the shelving of more insignificant ones, owing largely tothe fear that flexibility would lead to corruption. In 2009, an investigation by the special inspector general for Afghanistanreconstruction found that all of the detention cells at the center "were occupiedby low-profile detainees." "Because it was filled with low-profile detainees, the Center didnot have any available detention cells to hold mid- andhigh-profile drug traffickers," the report continued, counting 55detainees in the prison at the time. A few months later, in response to the report, the DOJ said thatthe number of high-level detainees at the center had risen tothree. Given the nature of the proceedings, and the minimal fail-safesthat seem to be in place, an inordinate amount of the burden forthe final disposition of drug cases inevitably falls to the firstpeople who encounter a suspect, most often the Counter NarcoticsPolice of Afghanistan (CNP-A). During a visit to Helmand Province, a southern region of thecountry that is one of the centers of poppy growth and westerncounter-narcotics operations, HuffPost was told that Britishadvisers to the specialized unit had never seen the force declineto forward a case because it was deemed too insubstantial or theevidence was too weak. The high conviction rate at the court, one British adviser said,constituted a "positive credible threat [to drug dealers] becauseit means that if you end up in the hands of the CNP-A, you'reprobably in trouble." (He also called the conviction rate at theCNJC "incredibly high.") Base corruption and malfeasance may have been weeded out at thecourt in Kabul, but, according to the adviser, direct westernoversight of the CNP-A's handling of smaller cases is minimal, andwhile he might "glance over evidence packs at times," there islittle by way of a thorough mechanism for ensuring that the rightsuspect is being sent to Kabul. The adviser also acknowledged that some of the lower limits for thecourt's jurisdiction, especially 10 kilos of opium, were a fairlycommon amount for average poppy farmers to possess. "I would suggest that's probably a low figure, your average field,"he said. "We send a lot of people up [to Kabul] who are not medium-to high-level opium dealers -- just your average farmer who storedup a bit of opium." In Ahmad Kazim's case, there was no evidence introduced at thetrial to even attempt to suggest that he was part of a major gang,or that he was a repeat offender. Outside the courtroom that Tuesday, after the sentence was handeddown -- it was not announced publicly -- Kazim's defense attorney,Mohamed Saeedi, said that justice had not been served. "Everybody is convicted in this court," he said. In three years ofprivate defense practice, Saeedi said, he has tried about 100 casesat the CNJC, and won acquittals in 10 of them. "The lawyers here always say, 'We can't do anything wrong becausethe foreigners are always watching us,'" he said. "But they aredoing it wrong. And the people blame the foreigners for this courtsystem -- they say that the foreigners have brought it to us." Kazim's older brother, Ali, who had traveled to Afghanistan towatch the trial, sat nearby in a daze. "I had no idea what to expect coming here today. My heart waspounding in my chest all morning," he said, as he waited to learnif he could visit with his brother once more before theincarceration. "The court is so much harsher here than it is in mycountry.". We are high quality suppliers, our products such as EPDM Rubber Granules , China Artificial Turf Football for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits Artificial Turf Athletic Fields.
Related Articles -
EPDM Rubber Granules, China Artificial Turf Football,
|
