U. law faculty to help with global justice reform project

University of Utah law school faculty will be heavily involved in training prosecutors from Afghanistan, according to a recent announcement made at the nation's capital.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday announced the beginning of the Public-Private Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan. The project is meant to create better social welfare for the war-torn country and its citizens.

"When you reform the justice system, you not only get stability in the court process, but reduce the propensity for violence, crime and corruption," said U. law professor Wayne McCormack. He said that for three years, the U. had been working on similar proposals to upgrade the rule of law in struggling countries. The proposal was realized when the State Department stepped in.

The S.J. Quinney College of Law at the U. will loan its professors who have expertise in international, criminal and Middle Eastern law to lead the Global Justice Project.

Several faculty members will travel to Afghanistan to get footed in Islamic and Hebrew law and then return with a number of Afghan prosecutors to develop a training program that the Afghan lawyers can utilize in their country to inform and train nearly 2,000 other prosecutors there.

"This sort of discipline requires an interactive program, and we just happen to have several hundred years of history to draw upon," McCormack said.

The international integration, however, is not new to the U. Various educators and interns from various disciplines have been involved in overseas training programs, including scientific and technological missions, and now rule of law. The forthcoming efforts, McCormack said, will attempt to contribute materials and knowledge to further the judicialization of Afghanistan.

"The country has been heavily impacted by the turmoil of the region for centuries," he said. He added that a Soviet impact has also taken a toll on the government as well as the Taliban's lack of a formal judicial rule.

The project is still in preparation phase and McCormack said he believes faculty will be traveling to Afghanistan sometime next spring.

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E-mail: wleonard@desnews.com