A woman judge in Kabul, Afghanistan, is standing in a sewer amidst a crush of people, tear gas and bullets in the air. She’s trying to get into Hamid Karzai International Airport but stuck in the throng, terrified, she can’t see how to reach her contact. 

A woman judge in Wellington, New Zealand, is typing into her phone. 

“You just have to go a little further. I know it’s hard,” she texts, “but please go.” 

Already another judge’s husband has had a gun held to his head and they’ve had to retreat. Other women judges have been badly beaten trying to get through Taliban checkpoints. 

But Leila* is so close. 

It’s the final days of August as the world is walking away from Afghanistan. Time is running out, and the Wellington judge is on a video call with her colleagues, all over the world, poring over maps, texting instructions, calling the Afghan women with comforting words. 

She’s coordinating with Polish authorities who have agreed to help, and their people at Kabul airport can see Leila, they have eyes on her: she’s near, she just has to keep going.

The Wellington woman so desperately trying to help - then, and now - is Supreme Court Judge Dame Susan Glazebrook. Jurists of her status and seniority don’t usually give interviews, but this is different, she explains by video link from her chambers in the capital to Stuff Circuit in Auckland. 

“I want to speak out for the women judges of Afghanistan. They are women who are effectively in danger of their lives just for doing their jobs.” 

She’s speaking out in her role as president of the International Association of Women Judges, to which she was appointed in May this year - the first time a New Zealander has headed the organisation of 6000 women judges from 100 countries. 

“I'm very committed to its vision of a world where everybody has equal access to justice. We believe that women judges have a big role to play in achieving that vision.”

But she took on the job at a time when judges themselves were in need of justice. 

Four months earlier, two women judges were assassinated in Kabul, on their way to work at the Supreme Court of Afghanistan. Gunmen opened fire on the Honourable Fazia Herawi and the Honourable Qadria Yashini in their vehicle, injuring a third female judge and their driver, victims in a string of targeted killings of high-profile figures. 

So Justice Glazebrook gave her personal pledge to other Afghan women judges that as their president, she would support them. 

Which is why, from 14,000 kilometres away, she was holding Leila’s hand. 

“I started to almost hallucinate that I was walking through a sewer myself.”

It took 20 hours, but Leila finally got through the gates, and on the other side of those gates was safety.

Thirty women judges made it onto evacuation lists, into that hellhole of an airport, and onto planes to safe havens elsewhere. But for 230 other women judges in Afghanistan, it was too hard. They couldn’t get the right documentation in time, or couldn’t get through the crowds. 

“The real heartbreak was when people had to turn back,” says Glazebrook. “They had to turn back because their children weren’t well and they just could not continue. So, so close. 

“We knew the Polish authorities could see them, but it was too much for them to carry on. Absolutely heartbreaking.” 

It’s heartbreaking too when you consider the women judges had been a powerful symbol of how much progress was being made in Afghanistan. 

Under the oppressive Taliban regime of the 1990s girls and women weren’t allowed to be educated. They were banned from work. They certainly would never have been permitted to sit in judgment of men. 

All that changed, albeit slowly, with the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Women made their way through universities and into law firms and courts. They might have been severely under-represented in the fledgling independent judiciary, but they were there, helping establish the rule of law, peace, and democracy in Afghanistan. 

Azadeh* is one of those women judges. From Kabul, she told Stuff Circuit that as a lawyer, she had witnessed how difficult it was for women victims to achieve justice, and that became her motivation. 

“As an advocate I learned that a female judge and lawyer is more reliable and trustworthy to a victim because they are kind, against corruption, and careful to maintain rights. This was the biggest reason that made me become a judge. I thought I would try my best to be beneficial and have effective rule in the judicial system.” 

When the Taliban first regained control of Afghanistan, it sent encouraging signals about women’s rights, saying they would be protected - though with the caveat “within the confines of Sharia law”. 

A month on, the protection has not eventuated, as female government workers are told to stay home, and new decrees are issued limiting the rights of girls and women. 

And if the Taliban ever really did have a will to allow women to work, it’s unlikely that would have extended to judges. 

“The Taliban is against the work of women,” says Azadeh, “but if they allow women to work, women judges will not be on their permission list. In the Taliban mentality a woman does not have the capacity and intelligence to be a judge. Women judges are sinful.” 

But livelihoods stripped away and hard-fought careers denied are not the only concern.

“A few days before the Taliban took over I was alerted that some groups were trying to target the car I was in, and terrorise us,” Azadeh says. “The cases I have worked on put my life and my family's lives at risk and I am extremely in danger.”

The danger stems not only from the Taliban’s contemptuous ideas about women “who had the effrontery to judge men”, as Glazebrook puts it, but also from individual retribution - carried out by the men they had sentenced. 

“When the Taliban hit Kabul, they emptied the prisons of the worst kind of criminals,” she says. “Terrorists, and not just Taliban, but also ISIS, and major drug criminals.”

Imperilled because of performing their duties in the very careers they were so encouraged to pursue.

Now, many of the women judges are reporting the Taliban coming to their former houses looking for them, or being phoned with direct warnings. 

Many have been sent a chilling video, viewed and verified by Stuff Circuit as a Taliban commander warning judges, prosecutors, and prison directors that they can’t hide, that they will not escape punishment. 

They are in hiding, of course, or trying to be - moving from house to house, never staying too long, their fears exacerbated by their personal circumstances. 

“A lot of these women have very young children,” says Glazebrook. “Some of them are pregnant and absolutely scared stiff that if they have to go to hospital, that will be the end for them because they'll be identified after they've given birth.”

It’s all a brutal penalty for the part they played in what Western allies wanted: a reconstructed Afghanistan that would respect human rights and the rule of law. 

“We the judges were working to bring stability to make the world a peaceful place, without terrorism,” Azadeh says. “But now we are alone with the decisions we made.”