About

Why This Matters to Me?

I was a young girl the first time the Taliban took over Afghanistan. I had just started school.

Then I was told to stop going. Not because of my grades. Not because of anything I had done. Because I was a girl.

My brother kept walking to school every morning. I stayed home.

I waited for years. I waited for my classmates. I waited for my teachers. I waited for the door to open again.

When it finally did, I went back. I sat in a classroom with children years younger than me. I had missed too much time to sit with children my own age.

I graduated late. Later than I should have. Later than I wanted to.

That was my first lesson in how fragile rights are. A regime changes. A policy changes. And your whole life changes with it.

I did not stop there. I finished my law degree. I went on to work on justice and judicial institution reforms programs, rule of law and legislative reform in Afghanistan. I led and oversaw projects to reform laws and to bring judicial institutions into the digital age.

One day, a woman came to our office. She had run away from a forced marriage. Running away is not a crime under the law. But she was still sent for a virginity test, to prove she is still virgin.

She was a survivor. And the system made her a victim twice.

That case stayed with me. It was one of the reasons we pushed to criminalize practices like this in the penal code, working with the government of Afghanistan through a U.S. State Department rule of law program. It taught me that laws on paper mean nothing if the systems around them do not protect people.

I gave fifteen years of my life to this work. Reforming laws. Reforming institutions. Trying to make justice reachable for people who had none.

Then, overnight, we lost it all. The Taliban returned. Two decades of progress disappeared in days. All the systems and the laws I have worked to develope and reform were lost overnight.

A right you have today is not a right you are guaranteed tomorrow. I learned that as a child. I learned it again as a grown woman.

Now I see the same pattern taking a new shape. Technology and artificial intelligence are becoming the new gatekeepers of rights. Algorithms can decide who is seen, who is heard, and who is left out. They can carry the same bias, the same discrimination, that I spent fifteen years fighting in written law.

This is why I teach international human rights law. I write about human rights and technology, and the law. Not as a theory. As something I have lived.

I know what it costs to lose a right. I know how quickly it can happen. And I know how important it is to build systems, human and digital, that we can actually hold accountable.

This website is where I bring those two parts of my life together.