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ABA mission is supporting Afghan authorized professionals…
Worldwide Regulation
ABA mission is supporting Afghan authorized professionals 4 years after fall of Kabul
By Amanda Robert
August 20, 2025, 11:38 am CDT
Folks wave to a army helicopter after it dropped flowers over 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 attorneys from Afghanistan resettle, get hold of immigration advantages and safe jobs utilizing their authorized expertise.
One in all its tasks is the Afghan Authorized Professionals Scholarship and Mentoring Pilot Program, which focuses on primarily serving to feminine judges, attorneys and prosecutors from Afghanistan qualify to grow to be attorneys in the USA by acquiring LLM levels at ABA-accredited regulation faculties.
“As an American lawyer, I really feel we now have an ethical obligation to assist Afghan authorized professionals who misplaced every part and needed to abandon their houses 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 Drive, 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 faculties that agreed to supply full-tuition scholarships to certified Afghan authorized professionals. This contains American College Washington School of Regulation, Northwestern Pritzker College of Regulation and the College of California, Davis College 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 at the moment supporting 16 Afghan authorized professionals who’re completely resettled in the USA. Since Could 2024, 9 mentee fellows have graduated with LLM levels and are finding out for the bar examination by means of prolonged bar assessment programs. These are provided without cost by Themis Bar Assessment.
Two mentee fellows at the moment 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 College of Regulation with an LLM diploma and a enterprise regulation certificates in Could. 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 Girls Judges Affiliation, and after the autumn of Kabul in 2021, she supported the Worldwide Affiliation of Girls 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 publication, 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 battle 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 Drive.
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 deal with myriad points, together with accessing English as a Second Language programs, helping with the regulation college software course of and figuring out skilled alternatives, Katz says.
“The ABA is stuffed with gifted 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 gives further sources to the mentee fellows, together with a $25,000 stipend to assist cowl their housing and dwelling 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.
So far, the duty power 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 gives authorized English assessments and programs; LexisNexis Rule of Regulation Basis, which gives on-line authorized analysis coaching; and Juriscribe, which gives translations of educational and authorized paperwork.
Sooner or later, Byowitz says the duty power 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 process power members and mentors, has completed an ideal deal up to now,” Byowitz says. “However we have to elevate extra funds and recruit extra mentors to be able to assist many extra Afghan attorneys, judges and prosecutors qualify to grow to be attorneys within the U.S.”
ABA members who’re curious about turning into mentors or volunteering with the Afghan Authorized Professionals Resettlement Activity Drive 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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