ABA project is supporting Afghan legal professionals 4 years after fall of Kabul
In the months following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on Aug. 15, 2021, the ABA began working to help judges and lawyers from Afghanistan resettle, obtain immigration benefits and secure jobs using their legal skills.
One of its projects is the Afghan Legal Professionals Scholarship and Mentoring Pilot Program, which focuses on primarily helping female judges, lawyers and prosecutors from Afghanistan qualify to become lawyers in the United States by obtaining LLM degrees at ABA-accredited law schools.
“As an American lawyer, I feel we have a moral obligation to help Afghan legal professionals who lost everything and had to abandon their homes and flee their country with their lives at risk because they worked in a legal system that the U.S. helped to create and sustain, one that brought the rule of law to a place where it had previously been absent,” says Michael Byowitz, the chair of the International Law Section’s Afghan Legal Professionals Resettlement Task Force, which created the pilot program.
Since June 2022, when the ABA Board of Governors approved the pilot program, Byowitz helped build partnerships with 25 law schools that agreed to offer full-tuition scholarships to qualified Afghan legal professionals. This includes American University Washington College of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and the University of California, Davis School of Law.
These scholarships amount to more than $1 million in waived tuition costs for Afghan legal professionals, who in the pilot program are referred to as mentee fellows, adds Byowitz, of counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York City.
Michael ByowitzThe pilot program is currently supporting 16 Afghan legal professionals who are permanently resettled in the United States. Since May 2024, nine mentee fellows have graduated with LLM degrees and are studying for the bar exam through extended bar review courses. These are offered for free by Themis Bar Review.
Two mentee fellows currently are enrolled in LLM programs and will graduate after the fall semester. Five others plan to begin their studies this month.
Tayeba Parsa is a mentee fellow who graduated from the Duke University School of Law with an LLM degree and a business law certificate in May. A former judge from Afghanistan, she has an undergraduate degree in Islamic law from Kabul University and a master’s degree in criminal law and criminology from Azad University.
Parsa served as the communications officer for the Afghan Women Judges Association, and after the fall of Kabul in 2021, she supported the International Association of Women Judges’ efforts to evacuate her endangered colleagues from Afghanistan. She also was evacuated, leaving behind her life and career.
According to the pilot program, which features Parsa’s story in its July newsletter, she “deepened her legal expertise, completed an externship with a nonprofit financial institution and reconnected with her purpose as a legal professional” while in Duke’s LLM program.
Now she is “dedicated to serving the Afghan diaspora, advocating for human rights and gender equality, and continuing the fight for the rule of law—wherever she may be,” the pilot program also says of Parsa.
What can you do to help?
An integral part of the pilot program is its mentoring initiative, says Dana Katz, vice chair of the Afghan Legal Professionals Resettlement Task Force.
More than 40 ABA members have volunteered to mentor Afghan legal professionals as they prepare to attend an LLM program or after they are admitted and enrolled in the program. They help address myriad issues, including accessing English as a Second Language courses, assisting with the law school application process and identifying professional opportunities, Katz says.
“The ABA is full of talented people, and we are leveraging that incredible brain trust,” says Katz, an attorney in Connecticut. “ABA members who are mentors are giving life to the pilot program.”
ABA volunteers receive resources and training, including trauma-informed mentoring training. They also learn from the mentee fellows through the program’s “peer-to-peer mentor model,” Katz adds.
“Our Afghan colleagues come with dynamism, energy, talent and expertise in so many ways that it’s incredibly gratifying to be a mentor,” she says.
The Afghan Legal Professionals Scholarship and Mentoring Pilot Program provides additional resources to the mentee fellows, including a $25,000 stipend to help cover their housing and living expenses while they are pursuing their LLM degrees. Many of them left Afghanistan with young children or elderly parents and are working part-time jobs to support their families.
To date, the task force has raised $328,000 to fund these stipends, Byowitz says.
The pilot program’s mentee fellows also receive free services through three other volunteer service providers: USLawEssentials, which provides legal English assessments and courses; LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation, which provides online legal research training; and Juriscribe, which provides translations of academic and legal documents.
In the future, Byowitz says the task force hopes to secure grants and additional funding to assist more mentee fellows and hire permanent staff. He says more mentors also are needed in the pilot program.
“I’m proud that the pilot program, with the incredible work of task force members and mentors, has accomplished a great deal to date,” Byowitz says. “But we need to raise more funds and recruit more mentors in order to help many more Afghan lawyers, judges and prosecutors qualify to become lawyers in the U.S.”
ABA members who are interested in becoming mentors or volunteering with the Afghan Legal Professionals Resettlement Task Force should contact Jane Haldiman at [email protected]. Those who wish to donate to the pilot program can select “Afghan Legal Professionals” from the dropdown menu at this International Law Section website.
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