Nicholas Soames: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what progress he has made on reducing non-security-related crime in Afghanistan. [136238]

Alistair Burt, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Foreign & Commonwealth Office: By strengthening the judicial system, we continue to work with the Afghan Government to increase their capacity to deal effectively with crime, for example through police and judiciary training and mentoring, courts and prison funding. A key example is the Criminal Justice Task Force (CJTF), a multi-departmental Afghan detention, investigation, prosecution and judicial team, which the UK has helped to establish to target the narcotics trade. The CJTF has secured over 1,000 convictions for narcotics offences since it was established in 2005. In 2010-11, the CJTF convicted 621 people of drugs trafficking offences.

We are also working to strengthen links to statutory justice systems, providing legal education and developing civil groups to provide better monitoring and oversight, to make community-based justice system, more accountable.

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