In 2023–24, UWCHR supported multiple scholars who came to UW after fleeing violence in their home countries. These included Mahir Hazim, who shares his experience as an Afghan legal scholar in the interview below.
Mahir Hazim is an acting assistant professor of law at the University of Washington School of Law. Previously he was a visiting associate research professor at Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University; taught law and political science courses at several universities, including Alberoni University in Afghanistan; and worked with numerous national and international development organizations. He completed his PhD (2020) and his LLM (2016) at the University of Washington School of Law, where he also served as an editorial member for the Washington International Law Journal.
Andrea: Mahir, thank you so much for sitting down to talk to us. Can you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself and your work, and what sparked your interest in human rights?
Mahir: My work covers many topics, but let me start from the beginning. I grew up in Afghanistan. By the time I was in high school I was really interested in human rights issues, based on what was going on in the country. At that time, the Taliban was in power but they were not able to control the whole country. The area we lived in was controlled by a resistance force and there was a war going on. From childhood to now, I have seen, like millions of other Afghans, massive human rights violations in the country. Human rights and fighting for justice were some of the main reasons I was interested in studying law and that’s why I went to law school in Afghanistan. I did my degree in law and political science, and right after my graduation I did the bar exam and started practicing law as a lawyer. I worked for Justice for All Organization at that time as a lawyer and legal trainer, representing women who were victims of domestic violence.
While the organization still functions today, they are not very visible because of the political situation and the Taliban restrictions. In fact, many in the organization, particularly the executive team, have been forced to leave Afghanistan because of the risks.
Later, I worked for a DC-based organization called Global Rights: Partners for Justice. That organization had many programs that provided free legal services and legal education with a focus on international human rights, teaching fourth-year law students practical skills in lawyering and introducing students to international human rights concepts, comparing Afghan law with international human rights conventions. We hoped that when students became lawyers, they would incorporate a human rights approach to their law practice—whether they became judges, prosecutors, lawyers, or legal advisors.
I started teaching at Afghanistan’s Alberoni University as a lecturer in 2013 while working with Global Rights. In December 2014, Global Rights closed, and I got the opportunity to come to the University of Washington to obtain my master’s in law. After graduation and completing an internship at the Law Library of Congress in Washington DC in 2016, I returned to Afghanistan to resume teaching at Alberoni University and worked with the International Law Development Organization, working on capacity building and human rights programs in Afghanistan.
I then returned to Seattle, to UW, to complete my PhD. At the same time that I was working with these organizations, I was also working as a lecturer in different universities, particularly at Alberoni University. I taught different courses: family law, international law, criminal procedure, and so many others.
After my PhD, I went back to Afghanistan in 2020, where I resumed working as a lecturer as well as started a new job with Afghanistan Legal Research and Development Organization. There we focused on capacity building and human rights development in the country. Particularly, we had a program with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, helping them improve their capacity in documenting human rights violations and conducting human rights awareness trainings. We also worked with the Afghan Women Judges Association, trying to help Afghan women judges to establish their own institution and association, to have their own voice in shaping the judicial system in the country.
In 2021, I was in the country when the government collapsed and I had to flee. I ended up in Germany, evacuated by the German military during the chaotic evacuations in August 2021 in Kabul Airport. Prior to returning to the US, I briefly worked as a human rights officer with the United Nations Development Programme/Afghanistan. While in Germany, I was granted a fellowship by the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund, which co-sponsored my visit at Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. I spent two years there as a visiting scholar until I returned to the University of Washington.
A: How does it feel to be back at the UW? What differences or similarities are there—working on human rights issues in the US versus in Afghanistan?
M: I’m very excited to be back at UW Law. As a student I loved everything about the UW and have a lot of memories; I’m a proud UW Double Dawg. This time, I am returning not as a student, but as an instructor. I am thrilled to see and work alongside many of my wonderful professors and mentors from whom I have learned so much and to whom I am deeply indebted.
I’m still engaged with many organizations that I’ve worked with in the past, but in a very informal way. It’s a very challenging environment right now. As you know, the Taliban has established an extreme authoritarian and gender-apartheid regime, banning women from education, work, and public life, in addition to committing other massive human rights violations.
It’s very difficult to influence the situation from afar. Anyone who raises their voice or talks about human rights violations in the country will be persecuted. All the human rights activists and lawyers I have known for many years, they have all fled from Afghanistan. And those who could not flee have to be silent because the risk is too high and there isn’t any sort of accountability in the country if they are arrested, tortured, or in many cases killed. So the influence right now, in terms of changing the situation, it’s small–we can do very small things, maybe helping one woman, or helping another human rights activist to just keep their hope alive at this point.
The main hope is that our work as academics or human rights practitioners will influence policies and bring positive changes.
At the UW now, I teach a course on transnational criminal law and policy but am focusing more on research and publication. I just co-authored an article that was published in the Journal of International Criminal Justice related to human rights violations and international crimes investigations in Afghanistan. In that article we cover how the International Criminal Court (ICC) has used third-party evidence to make the decision whether to initiate investigations into the situation in Afghanistan.
In addition to human rights focuses, I also study international law, specifically different international treaties and Afghanistan’s compliance with those treaties; for example, areas of transnational law like the UN Convention Against International Organized Crime, the UN Convention Against Corruption, and those kinds of international treaties. Some of my other work relates to constitutional law. I wrote an article, which will be published in the Tulane Journal of International and Comparative Law, about executive authoritarianism, which is framed as constitutional law but also as a human rights issue because when we talk about authoritarianism there is always a possibility of violating human rights in authoritarian contexts.
Since the beginning of summer this year, I’ve been working on the topic of prosecuting transnational disinformation in the United States, mentored by Professor Mary Fan at the UW Law School. I’m in a state of transitioning my scholarship from an Afghanistan context to a US and international arena, although most of my work has had a comparative aspect. I realize disinformation is a very controversial and very challenging topic and it really needs more time. When you talk about disinformation and prosecution, the First Amendment and freedom of speech come in, and it is very difficult to strike a balance between the two.
In addition to that, I’m working on an article with an Indonesian scholar, Choky Ramadhan, who is a PhD candidate at UW Law studying mutual assistance legal mechanisms—how the Indonesian government combats transnational crime and how the country’s mutual legal assistance mechanisms are effective both in theory and practice. In 2019 I was a visiting scholar at the University of Indonesia and I conducted empirical research interviewing many officials: the Ministry of Law and Human Rights, the attorney general’s office, the National Police, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I’m trying to publish my research findings supplemented by new empirical data we are collecting now.
A: What would you say are some of the biggest challenges of doing this work, or biggest rewards?
M: I think, in terms of rewards, it’s always fulfilling for me to work on something and see my work being published and, in many cases, attending conferences and presenting my work to legal academia in the United States and receiving feedback and appreciation. The main hope is that our work as academics or human rights practitioners will influence policies and bring changes. As academics, we can provide ideas, we can identify problems, we can propose solutions.
The biggest challenge for me, after returning to the US, is changing my scholarship and academic focus after realizing I may not return to Afghanistan soon.
From childhood to now, I have seen, like millions of other Afghans, massive human rights violations in the country. Human rights and fighting for justice were some of the main reasons I was interested in studying law and that’s why I went to law school in Afghanistan.
A: As a human rights practitioner, how do you measure the effectiveness of your work? Are there specific times when you’ve seen your work directly contribute to advancing human rights? This is a question about your particular work and also a broader question of how we, as international human rights advocates, measure efficacy. How do you think about that?
M: I think this is the hardest question for human rights organizations or practitioners because, based on my experience, the question of effectiveness is always there—from within the organization, but also from donors, from a programmatic perspective, and so on. This is really a hard question. In my view, it really depends on the nature of the work that a person is doing to advance human rights.
For example, if I work as a human rights lawyer, I think the more people whose rights are violated that I can help, the more effective I am, right? Because we would see an immediate result.
Another way to look at it is, for example, when I worked with the Afghanistan Human Rights Commission training their trainers on human rights law and documentation, if we taught them something new, some new skills that they could use—which had been the goal for any trainings that we did—that would be something effective for that purpose.
In another example, if the goal of human rights advocates is to change some human-rights–restricting policies or laws, and they succeed, that may show their effectiveness in their work.
But generally speaking, in any human rights situation, in any context, I think keeping pressure on, raising your voice, and calling out human rights violations—this is an effective way of advancing human rights anywhere in the world. For example, even in the current context in Afghanistan, even the Taliban, although they don’t care about any sort of human rights violations, when human rights activists who are now out of Afghanistan call out the Taliban and name human rights violations, providing reports and documenting those violations, the Taliban gets angry. Even though the effect might be really minimal, still you could say that you may have prevented the Taliban from doing the worst things because they felt pressure. Plus, the international community, the states that are engaged with the Taliban, they too feel the pressure from that advocacy, resulting in them wanting to put more pressure on the Taliban. Here I’m just talking about Afghanistan, but generally anywhere, being vocal about human rights violations and raising your voice will have some effects.
But generally speaking, in any human rights situation, in any context, I think keeping pressure on, raising your voice, and calling out human rights violations—this is an effective way of advancing human rights anywhere in the world.
A: Do you have advice for students who are interested in pursuing human rights work?
M: Well, I notice that students taking a course on human rights—it’s very different from being at the helm of things and trying to change something for the better. After graduation from law school, when I started working, I felt like I didn’t know anything! Depending on the school curriculum, there might be a huge gap between theory and practice. Seeing events across the globe, particularly massive human rights violations, is disappointing and depressing. As a person, as an academic, as a human rights practitioner who wants to see human rights respected, as anyone who potentially wants to work in this area, we may lose hope or interest after being disappointed by real-world human rights violations. I think anyone who wants to pursue their passion in a human rights field has to get engaged in human rights early on. They should be able to see what they learn in theory and what they see and feel in practice, so they can close that gap, so they aren’t disappointed when they see, at some point in their career, human rights violations and give up quickly without being persistent and continuing to work to better the situation. If students can get involved with human rights organizations or institutions while they’re also studying, that would make a lot of changes in their perspectives, in their work, and also in their general view of human rights. For students here at UW, there are many human rights organizations in the Seattle area that are working locally as well as globally. Get involved with these organizations, maybe as an intern, or talk to a human rights practitioner. See the real challenges and real-world issues. I think that would be extremely helpful.
The following interview is featured in UWCHR’s 2023-2024 Annual Report.
Explore Dr. Hazim’s recent publications:
“An Urgent Need for Justice: Expediting the International Criminal Court’s Afghanistan Investigation,” The Diplomat, 2022.
“Going Back to Zero: How the Afghan Legal and Judicial System Is Collapsing Under the Taliban Regime,” JURIST, 2022.
“Epistemic Injustice at the ICC? An Empirical Analysis of the Use of Third-Party Evidence in the Afghanistan Situation,” Journal of International Criminal Justice, 2024.
“Digital Evidence Collection at the Int’l Criminal Court: Promises and Pitfalls,” Just Security, 2023.