Following Spain, Belgium and France, Britain is the fourth European country this year to try a non-national in a case of universal jurisdiction. In the first trial of its kind to be heard in England, an Afghan warlord, Farayadi Sarwar Zardad, 42, was convicted of torture committed in his home country before the Old Bailey criminal court in London. He was given a 20-year prison sentence on 19 July. Zardad moved to Britain in 1998 seeking asylum and was running a pizza parlour in South London when he was arrested in 2002 after being uncovered by a BBC journalist. His conviction was established after a lengthy and costly proceeding, and after a first trial during which the jury failed to reach a verdict last year. British human rights organisations have hailed it as an historic victory. Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International said: "This case strengthens the legal principle that torture is an international crime and that there is no hiding place for torturers around the world."

The court heard witnesses describe the atrocities carried out by Zardad and his men, some of them with the help of a live satellite link from Kabul. Between 1991 and 1996, Zardad controlled an 80-km area that included a vital supply route between Kabul and Pakistan. He had close links with the conservative Islamic party Hizb-i-Islami, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the prime minister of Afghanistan in the early 1990s. Today Hekmatyar is on the run, and his men are thought to have joined a Taliban uprising in the south of the country. Guy Willoughby, director of Halo Trust, an anti-mine NGO, testified in court to Zardad's cruelty.

Later in a BBC interview, Willoughby said Zardad "was the nastiest of the nastiest". "He controlled the checkpoint on the only road between Kabul and Pakistan where, during the heaviest fighting in the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of people were trying to leave Kabul. They had to go through Zardad's checkpoint with all their family possessions. He was the nightmare scenario for people as they left Kabul, having to pass Zardad." The most arresting testimony during the trial was accounts of Zardad's "human dog" he used to terrify civilians.

Torture has been recognized as a "crime of universal jurisdiction" in Great Britain since a 1999 House of Lords ruling in the case of the former dictator Augusto Pinochet. Afghanistan and the UK are both parties to the UN torture Convention and are bound to extradite or to prosecute. With no extradition request from Afghanistan, Britain decided to prosecute in this case.

"No serious efforts" to prosecute criminals in Afghanistan

Zardad's conviction sparked scenes of joy in Kabul. Four years after the fall of the Taliban, the authorities there are still making "no serious efforts" to prosecute criminals suspected of war crimes and crimes against humanity, says the independent NGO Afghanistan Justice Project (AJP), in its report released in Kabul on 17 July. Following the US organisation Human Rights Watch, the AJP also pointed the finger at serious crimes suspects within the Afghan administration. On 19 July, Le Monde published the names of Karim Khalili, vice-president of the Republic, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, advisor to President Hamid Karzai, Abdul Rasghid Dostom, a top-ranking civil servant at the defence ministry, General Baba Jan, chief of police in Kabul and "Marshall" Fahim, Minister of Defence.

Some of the men stood as candidates in the October 2004 presidential election, and others will be in the legislative elections on 18 September, adds Le Monde. Associated Press reports that an Afghan Commissioner for Human Rights, Ahmad Nader Nadery, responded to AJP's allegations with the announcement that the government is looking into the idea of setting up a special court for war crimes and a truth commission in the country.
Until then, the only avenue for prosecuting Afghans for such crimes remains that of universal jurisdiction.