سکرتر ملا عمر کمیشنر کمیسیون حقوق بشر افغانستان شد. • As there has been a lot of confusion about the last new staff member, Mawlawi Abdul Rahman Hotak, his biography is longer than the others.(1) Mawlawi Hotak is from Zabul. According to his own account, he was too young to fight in the jihad of the 1980s and was a refugee in Pakistan, where he had a mixed education, attending primary school and a madrassa and graduating from the University of Karachi. He came back to Afghanistan in the early days of the Taleban. Independent sources put him as working in a secretarial role with Mullah Omar in the very earliest and rather chaotic days of the movement – he himself says he was head of the education department in Kandahar and founder of a newspaper Tolo-ye Afghan. He came to Kabul shortly after it fell to the Taleban in 1996 and worked in the Ministry of Transport in Kabul as a department head. He left the Taleban government, he said, just over a year later due to political disagreements. After the fall of the Taleban, he was a delegate at the Emergency Loya Jirga, a member of the Ulema Council and an advisor to the Ministry of Education. He was arrested from his home in Zabul in 2006/7 by US forces and taken to Bagram. He was released without facing any charge three years later and with a good command of English. On his release, he again became a member of the Ulema Council. He currently works in the Curriculum Department of the Ministry of Education. Members of the organised civil society have been critical of the appointments, both in terms of what they represent, and in terms of the process. There has been a long-standing tussle in which some of the more vocal civil society groups have argued that the AIHRC commissioners have held their positions for long enough. After the three commissioners were removed various civil society networks lobbied the president to consult them in the appointments and tried to ensure they would get at least some of the AIHRC seats by providing him with a list of 35 potential candidates (see earlier reporting here and here). They are now complaining that none of them were selected. However, there is also a more substantial and potentially damaging critique that says the new commissioners do not have the experience or qualifications in the human rights field to work effectively and the Commission as a whole lacks the necessary political independence. Abdul Satar Sa’adat, head of the Lawyers Association of Afghanistan and a long-time critic of the Commission, is quoted here saying that due to the tanzeem background of some of the new appointees the commission will be soft on transitional justice. (He specifically mentioned links to Jamiat-e Islami and Ittehad-e Islami, although it is not clear which of the five he believes has the Ittehad links).
Posted on: Thu, 27 Jun 2013 03:44:10 +0000
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