Having received the assent of His Eminence Amirol Momenin, the judicial decision was administered at a stadium in the city of Herat today. Judges in these courts, many of whom are virtually untrained in law, reportedly base their judgements on a mixture of their personal understanding of Islamic law and the prevalent Pashtun code of honour. Amnesty International has received reports that such courts often decide a dozen different cases of alleged criminal activity a day, in sessions which may take only a few minutes. There are reportedly no provisions for defendants to be assisted by a legal counsel, the presumption of innocence is dispensed with and verdicts are final, with no mechanism for appropriate judicial appeal. It has been frequently reported that testimonies and statements of convicts accepting their sentences before they are carried out have been extracted under torture.
Some convictions appear to have been based solely on the allegations of the complainants.
Amnesty asks activists to write to Taleban authorities at the Embassy of Afghanistan in Islamabad, Pakistan, in protest against the executions of homosexuals. Amnesty also says to write your own government's foreign-affairs officials asking them to use what influence they may have with the Taleban. Meanwhile, on April 29, Taleban soldiers in Kabul, the Afghan capital, spent several hours publicly beating two fellow soldiers they caught having sex, Agence France-Presse said. They likely will be handed over to a military court and sentenced to death by having a wall collapsed on them, AFP said. Two-thirds of Afghanistan is held by the strict Moslem Taleban.