Legal Pluralism in Afghanistan

This paper gives an overview of the Afghan legal system. In the Afghan context, analysing the legal system means to focus on three different pillars: customary law, statutory law and Islamic law. One therefore speaks of “legal pluralism”. However, this topic is a very complex one and therefore not easy to grasp: all three types of Afghan legal systems were shattered by roughly 25 years of war, and hardly any research material on the development of legal systems of that time is available. The paper tries to sketch the complexity of the topic and to present the most urgent problems regarding the country’s present legislature and legal practice by means of several examples.