Efforts to move a hydro-electric power turbine across 100 miles of hostile territory in Afghanistan earlier this month proved to be one of the most challenging and successful British military operations since the Army moved into Helmand province.

It will go a long way towards improving the lives of ordinary Afghans — as will another, less well publicised endeavour, in which an English lawyer has been instrumental. The creation of the country’s Bar Association, will, it is hoped, dramatically improve the position of rule of law in the war-torn nation.

Just as the military operation was in the making for several years, the creation of the Independent Afghan Bar Association has been a slow and gradual process. Its roots date to 2004 when a project funded by Sweden’s ministry of foreign affairs and implemented by the London-based International Bar Association (IBA) was launched with the aim of creating an association that would build the foundation of an independent legal profession in the country.

This summer those efforts came to fruition as more than 650 lawyers joined the youngest association in the international community of legal bodies. As the proud father, the IBA beamed: “The new bar association . . . will act as a necessary counterpoint to the Government and the courts in the delivery of justice and the rule of law in the country.”

That will be a tall order. Arguably, Afghanistan is today just as unstable, insecure and dangerous — if not more so — than it was four years ago. However, from the perspective of the legal profession, there are positive signs — for example, the number of practising lawyers, while not large by western standards, has nonetheless doubled in the past 18 months. Indeed, the members of the association represent most of the practising profession.

All of which is hugely satisfying to the English human rights solicitor who oversaw most of the practicalities of the association’s birth. By the end of last year, Alex Wilkes had managed to lobby, cajole and charm Afghan parliamentarians into enacting the required legislation that came into force at the end of March. It was not an easy journey.

“Parliament is \ a nascent institution — \ then, it was in only its second year,” Wilkes recalls. “Its procedures are pretty chaotic and at the time there was a backlog of something like 100 draft laws and decrees from the interim government waiting to go through.”

His task was made even more difficult by the lack of western-style political parties in the young Kabul parliament, meaning that traditional lobbying channels were non-existent. And even explaining the goal to Afghan lawyers was complicated — there is no direct translation in Dari (the local Persian language) of the phrase bar association, or even the rule of law for that matter.

There was also a significant specialist interest hurdle to surmount. “A minority of senior Afghan lawyers want things to stay the way they are,” Wilkes acknowledges. “In other words, they don’t want increased regulation. And there will be some that want to get involved in a bar association for their own political reasons. But that is a problem with bar associations around the globe — and everything in Afghanistan at the moment is political.”

The law was passed — a testament to Wilkes’s negotiating skills — and now the association is setting about drafting its by-laws and a code of practice for Afghan lawyers. It continues to make history as it does so, with the association determined to take a lead in advancing the position and role of women in Afghan society. Its by-laws require that at least one of the association’s two vice-presidents must be a woman, as must be at least three of the 15 executive committee members.

The association is also taking a progressive approach towards helping the country’s thousands of impoverished citizens who are in danger of being denied access to justice. Before being registered, the association will require lawyers to demonstrate that they have done at least three pro bono cases in the previous year.

Phillip Tahmindjis, deputy director of the IBA’s human rights institute, maintains that the move is likely to be unique among international bar associations. “Rule of law is improving in the country but there are still many problems,” he says. “It will be a great help having a bar association that imposes ethical obligations to ensure that people who in the past would not have received representation now will have access to a lawyer.”

Indeed, there are many issues for a revitalised and growing Afghan legal profession to tackle. To put the situation into context, while there are fewer than 700 lawyers in the country, there are more than 10,000 detainees in prison in need of legal representation. It is perhaps an understandable reaction to assume that the thousands detained are accused of terrorism offences, but the reality is that many are incarcerated on allegations of a range of run-of-the-mill petty offences.

Indeed, Alex Wilkes highlights a particular category in desperate need of legal advice: “There are women who have run away from their families to avoid or escape forced marriages. The police can arrest and prosecutors bring charges for what they consider to be un-Islamic activity.”

Many political and cultural potholes lie ahead on the path to a credible position for the rule of law in Afghanistan. Not least being that many traditional Islamic judges in the country have never had a lawyer appear before them and most of the country citizens — especially in the rural regions — are ignorant of what a lawyer does. Nonetheless, the world’s newest bar association can only be a positive step on the country’s slow road towards modernisation and peace.

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