Since opening its doors on August 27, 2008, the Independent National Legal Training Center Law Library (INLTC) membership has grown to over 200 members.
The library, which was designed and developed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), now counts attorneys, Supreme Court staff members, judges, and judicial candidates, as well as members of the law and Sharia faculties at Kabul University, among its membership.
Created to serve the needs of Afghan legal professionals, the library includes all of Afghanistan’s laws, in Dari and Pashto languages, as well as 3,100 legal texts and international legal materials from Egypt, France, Pakistan, the European Union, and the United States. The collection also includes magazines, journals, and newspapers from the Supreme Court, Ministry of Justice, and Parliament. Over the course of the coming months, the library will house over 5,000 legal volumes and will become Afghanistan’s first depository library where future laws and legal materials will be available and preserved in one place.
USAID and the INLTC’s board of directors are working to make the law library’s resources available to all of Afghanistan’s legal professionals. For example, INLTC Law Library staff are offering classes in professional legal research methods to judges, students of law and Sharia, and other justice-sector professionals. This hands-on legal research program teaches trainees how to navigate the collection of all of Afghanistan’s laws passed since 1964—the Official Gazette—in electronic and hardcopy format. Training also covers how to look up legal materials on government websites, such as the Ministry of Justice’s full-text searchable online legal database, www.moj-research.gov.af, and USAID’s online collection of English translations of Afghan laws at www.AfghanistanTranslation.com.
To manage the library’s physical and electronic collections, the library’s trained staff members are developing an integrated automation system that includes an electronic library catalogue, searchable in both Dari and Pashto languages; a check-in and check-out circulation tracking system; and a monograph and serials bar-coding system. Soon, the web-based INTLC Law Library catalogue will be online so other Afghan and international libraries can search the library’s holdings and request materials, the first step toward a national inter-library loan system in Afghanistan.