Worldwide Regulation
ABA undertaking is supporting Afghan authorized professionals 4 years after fall of Kabul
August 20, 2025, 11:38 am CDT
Individuals wave to a army helicopter after it dropped flowers over the town throughout celebrations marking the fourth anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal in Kabul, Afghanistan on Aug. 15. (AP Photograph/Siddiqullah Alizai)
Within the months following the autumn of Kabul to the Taliban on Aug. 15, 2021, the ABA started working to assist judges and legal professionals from Afghanistan resettle, acquire immigration advantages and safe jobs utilizing their authorized expertise.
Certainly one of its initiatives is the Afghan Authorized Professionals Scholarship and Mentoring Pilot Program, which focuses on primarily serving to feminine judges, legal professionals and prosecutors from Afghanistan qualify to develop into legal professionals in the USA by acquiring LLM levels at ABA-accredited regulation colleges.
“As an American lawyer, I really feel we’ve an ethical obligation to assist Afghan authorized professionals who misplaced every part and needed to abandon their properties and flee their nation with their lives in danger as a result of they labored in a authorized system that the U.S. helped to create and maintain, one which introduced the rule of regulation to a spot the place it had beforehand been absent,” says Michael Byowitz, the chair of the Worldwide Regulation Part’s Afghan Authorized Professionals Resettlement Activity Pressure, which created the pilot program.
Since June 2022, when the ABA Board of Governors authorised the pilot program, Byowitz helped construct partnerships with 25 regulation colleges that agreed to supply full-tuition scholarships to certified Afghan authorized professionals. This contains American College Washington School of Regulation, Northwestern Pritzker Faculty of Regulation and the College of California, Davis Faculty of Regulation.
These scholarships quantity to greater than $1 million in waived tuition prices for Afghan authorized professionals, who within the pilot program are known as mentee fellows, provides Byowitz, of counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York Metropolis.
Michael Byowitz
The pilot program is presently supporting 16 Afghan authorized professionals who’re completely resettled in the USA. Since Might 2024, 9 mentee fellows have graduated with LLM levels and are finding out for the bar examination by means of prolonged bar overview programs. These are provided free of charge by Themis Bar Overview.
Two mentee fellows presently are enrolled in LLM applications and can graduate after the autumn semester. 5 others plan to start their research this month.
Tayeba Parsa is a mentee fellow who graduated from the Duke College Faculty of Regulation with an LLM diploma and a enterprise regulation certificates in Might. A former decide from Afghanistan, she has an undergraduate diploma in Islamic regulation from Kabul College and a grasp’s diploma in legal regulation and criminology from Azad College.
Parsa served because the communications officer for the Afghan Ladies Judges Affiliation, and after the autumn of Kabul in 2021, she supported the Worldwide Affiliation of Ladies Judges’ efforts to evacuate her endangered colleagues from Afghanistan. She additionally was evacuated, forsaking her life and profession.
In keeping with the pilot program, which options Parsa’s story in its July e-newsletter, she “deepened her authorized experience, accomplished an externship with a nonprofit monetary establishment and reconnected along with her goal as a authorized skilled” whereas in Duke’s LLM program.
Now she is “devoted to serving the Afghan diaspora, advocating for human rights and gender equality, and persevering with the struggle for the rule of regulation—wherever she could also be,” the pilot program additionally says of Parsa.
What are you able to do to assist?
An integral a part of the pilot program is its mentoring initiative, says Dana Katz, vice chair of the Afghan Authorized Professionals Resettlement Activity Pressure.
Greater than 40 ABA members have volunteered to mentor Afghan authorized professionals as they put together to attend an LLM program or after they’re admitted and enrolled in this system. They assist tackle myriad points, together with accessing English as a Second Language programs, aiding with the regulation college utility course of and figuring out skilled alternatives, Katz says.
“The ABA is filled with proficient folks, and we’re leveraging that unimaginable mind belief,” says Katz, an legal professional in Connecticut. “ABA members who’re mentors are giving life to the pilot program.”
ABA volunteers obtain sources and coaching, together with trauma-informed mentoring coaching. Additionally they study from the mentee fellows by means of this system’s “peer-to-peer mentor mannequin,” Katz provides.
“Our Afghan colleagues include dynamism, power, expertise and experience in so many ways in which it’s extremely gratifying to be a mentor,” she says.
The Afghan Authorized Professionals Scholarship and Mentoring Pilot Program offers further sources to the mentee fellows, together with a $25,000 stipend to assist cowl their housing and residing bills whereas they’re pursuing their LLM levels. A lot of them left Afghanistan with younger youngsters or aged dad and mom and are working part-time jobs to assist their households.
Up to now, the duty pressure has raised $328,000 to fund these stipends, Byowitz says.
The pilot program’s mentee fellows additionally obtain free providers by means of three different volunteer service suppliers: USLawEssentials, which offers authorized English assessments and programs; LexisNexis Rule of Regulation Basis, which offers on-line authorized analysis coaching; and Juriscribe, which offers translations of educational and authorized paperwork.
Sooner or later, Byowitz says the duty pressure hopes to safe grants and extra funding to help extra mentee fellows and rent everlasting workers. He says extra mentors are also wanted within the pilot program.
“I’m proud that the pilot program, with the unimaginable work of activity pressure members and mentors, has completed an awesome deal thus far,” Byowitz says. “However we have to increase extra funds and recruit extra mentors with a view to assist many extra Afghan legal professionals, judges and prosecutors qualify to develop into legal professionals within the U.S.”
ABA members who’re keen on changing into mentors or volunteering with the Afghan Authorized Professionals Resettlement Activity Pressure ought to contact Jane Haldiman at [email protected]. Those that want to donate to the pilot program can choose “Afghan Authorized Professionals” from the dropdown menu at this Worldwide Regulation Part web site.
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