Explaining varieties of corruption in the Afghan justice sector

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. Judicial reform in Afghanistan is seriously undermined by systemic corruption that has resulted in low legitimacy of the state and weak rule of law. This article reviews the main shortcomings in the Afghan justice system with reference to 70 interviews conducted in Kabul. Building on legal pluralism and a political economic approach, the shortcomings and causes and consequences of corruption in the Afghan justice sector are highlighted. These range from low pay, resulting in bribery; criminal and political intrusion into the judiciary; non-adherence to meritocracy, with poorly educated judges and prosecutors; and low funding in the judicial sector resulting in weak case tracking and human rights abuses in the countryside. This is followed by sociological approaches: understanding corruption from a non-Western approach and emphasis on religion, morality and ethics in order to curb it

Out of this world : the advent of the satellite tracking of offenders in England and Wales

In September 2004, the Home Office established three pilot programmes to test the efficacy of the satellite tracking of offenders, a new form of electronic monitoring. Satellite tracking, and the monitoring of exclusion zones which it permits, had been legislated for in the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000, but the Home Office waited until putatively reliable technology – more reliable than that initially used for tracking in the USA – was available before commencing the pilots. Its arrival was formally announced in the context of a major review of ‘correctional services’, in which electronic monitoring generally is given a clearer strategic role than it has had hitherto in England and Wales. Although snippets of information about satellite tracking were drip fed into the media in the run up to the launch of the pilots, this has been a most under-deliberated initiative. This article was completed just before the commencement of the pilots and aims primarily to open up debate about this new measure. It also argues that the emergence of satellite tracking – monitoring movement rather than just single locations – sheds light on the development of electronic monitoring more generally, whose implications for more humanistic approaches to offender supervision, such as probation, are still not fully appreciated

Managing withdrawal: Afghanistan as the forgotten example in attempting conflict resolution and state reconstruction

Perhaps surprisingly, given the availability of new Russian memoir material, some excellent individual monographs, and a large variety of declassified documents, a full operational-political account of the Soviet Union's withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan has yet to be written. This article, utilising openly published yet neglected sources, attempts to fill that gap. The final fate of the Najibullah regime, and the contradictory effect of the National Reconciliation Policy in Afghanistan itself, suggests four key lessons for international forces today as disengagement from both Iraq and Afghanistan again becomes a pressing issue, and as questions around re-creating stability within a failed state scenario again occupy the international community