Amini said she felt fear and began seeking asylum for herself and her family to escape Kabul. “We were worried about everything — our situation, our lives and especially our safety,” she told CNN in an interview from west London, where she now lives in temporary housing with her husband and four daughters. Before they left their house, Amini grabbed a pair of scissors, needle and thread. She cut rips in the lining of her dress and sewed in her most prized possession: her law degree. Wherever she ended up, the 48-year-old Afghan judge wanted to make sure she brought proof of her qualifications with her. Those same documents mean nothing now to her colleagues stuck in Afghanistan, some of whom have gone into hiding. Amina’s friend Samira, who served on the same court prosecuting violence against women, said she is among about 80 female judges still in the country. “Now I live like a prisoner,” Samira, whose full name was withheld to protect her safety, told CNN in a Skype interview. “They (the Taliban) stole my life.”

The change eroded

The crisis now facing female judges is emblematic of the total abolition of women’s rights by the Taliban over the past two decades in Afghanistan. Since 2001, when the group was last in power, the international community has pushed for legal protections for Afghan women and trained a cadre of young female judges, prosecutors and lawyers to support them. In 2009, then-President Hamid Karzai ordered the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) Act, criminalizing acts of abuse against women, including rape, forced marriage, and barring a woman or girl from going to school or work . Special courts to hear cases of violations of the law — like the one where Amina and Samira worked — were created in 2018 and established in at least 15 provinces across the country, according to Human Rights Watch. While full implementation has been spotty and achievements have fallen short of expectations, the law has been a driving force for slow but genuine change for women’s freedoms in Afghanistan — change that has quickly eroded. Last year, Taliban leaders banned the girls from high school and excluded women from most workplaces. They prevented women from traveling long distances alone, requiring a male relative to accompany them for any distance beyond 45 miles. New guidelines to broadcasters ban all dramas, soap operas and entertainment shows from featuring women and women’s news presenters have been ordered to wear headscarves on screen. And, in their latest edict, the Taliban ordered women to cover their faces in public, ideally wearing a burqa.
And by expelling women from the judiciary, the Taliban effectively denied them the right to legal recourse to redress any of these violations. It has left women and girls with nowhere to turn in a system that enshrines a hard-line Islamic interpretation of patriarchal authority, Amini explained. It was this terrifying reality, she says, that forced her to leave. Amini, her husband and daughters took a bus in September from Kabul to the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, driving 12 hours through the night with their headlights off to avoid detection.
“It was very difficult for us,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “At that time we were very worried about everything.” From Mazar-i-Sharif International Airport, they boarded a plane chartered specifically for female judges, organized with the help of Baroness Helena Kennedy, one of Britain’s most distinguished barristers. Last August, Kennedy, a member of the House of Lords, said she was inundated with WhatsApp messages from dozens of desperate judges, women she had developed a relationship with through her work setting up a bar association in Afghanistan. “It started with receiving really tragic and passionate messages on my iPhone,” she said. “Messages from people saying, ‘Please help me. I’m hiding in my basement. Already, I have received threatening messages. Already, there’s a target on my back.” Determined to help, Kennedy, along with the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, raised money for evacuations through a GoFundMe page and charitable donations from philanthropists. Over the course of several weeks, Kennedy says, the group chartered three separate planes that flew 103 women, most of them judges, and their families out of Afghanistan. The women are now scattered across many Western countries, many still in legal limbo and seeking more permanent residency for themselves and their families.

Hopes dashed

When Amini’s family left Afghanistan, she says they traveled first to Georgia and then to Greece, where they waited more than a month before receiving documents from the UK to apply for resettlement. They were eventually allowed to travel to the UK. But a year later, they are still living in a west London hotel, waiting for more permanent accommodation.
The British government has been criticized for failing to move around 10,000 Afghan refugees still living in hotels, such as the Amini, into permanent housing. “I imagined people would open their arms and say ‘bring me these incredibly brave women.’ But then my second set of problems arose because we had great difficulty finding places to resettle the women,” Kennedy said. Amini and Samira were once among Afghanistan’s pioneers, leading women’s rights judges who sought to create a fairer, more equal society. Now, they live worlds apart, their hopes for their country shattered. “We had a dream for a new Afghanistan. We wanted to change our lives, we wanted to change everything,” Amini said. “Now we have lost hope for our country. Everything has stopped.” Her priority has now turned to learning English. She hopes to one day resume her work in the UK. Her daughters are enrolled in local schools and are continuing their education — a right they would be denied in their native Afghanistan. For Samira, there seems to be no immediate way out of Kabul, at least for now. She fears for her young daughter and what it will mean for her to grow up under the Taliban. “I think about her future. How can I save her? Because life now in Afghanistan is so difficult and dangerous,” said Samira. “We are facing a slow death.”