Supreme Court Chief Justice Abdul Salam Azimi:
Prof. Azimi was born in 1937 in Nawbahar village of western Farah province. In 1949, he moved to Kabul was enrolled in a Paghman religious school, where modern sciences were also taught by local, Egyptian and Iraqi instructors. He later was enrolled in the Sharia Faculty of Kabul University, where he was appointed as assistant professor in 1959. He went to Cairo in the year 1967 to pursue his Master’s programme at Al-Azhar University, majoring in Sharia & Law.
He completed his education in the fields of family rights and comparative criminal law. Following his return home in 1967, he resumed his job as a professor at the Sharia Faculty. Azimi stayed in Washington from 1973 to 1975 and received certificates from the Comparative Law Faculty of George Washington University. In 1978, he was appointed as advisor on legal affairs to the Ministry of Justice. He left Kabul with his family and moved to Pakistan in 1982 before immigrating to the US in 1983. He was accepted as a member of Islamic Jurisprudence Encyclopedia Association in Kuwait in 1984.
One of his important achievements in 2002-2003 was drafting a new constitution of Afghanistan. He was appointed in 2004 as senior advisor to the president on legal affairs and then as director of the Legal and Judicial Board at the Presidential Palace. In August 2006 he was elevated as Chief Justice of Supreme Court. Azimi has visited Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Lebanon, Turkey, Germany, France, England, Holland, Canada, Italy, Spain, Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia. He is a prolific writer on Islamic Jurisprudence issues.