Guest Blogger: Marilyn J. Kaman

We at IntLawGrrls are honored to welcome the Honorable Marilyn J. Kaman (right), Judge of the Hennepin County District Court, Minneapolis, Minnesota. As today's guest blogger, she contributes a post drawn from her recent presentation at the 3d Annual International Humanitarian Law Dialogs in Chautauqua, New York, an event for which, as we've posted, IntLawGrrls was a proud cosponsor.

Marilyn holds a bachelor's degree cum laude from Vanderbilt University, a certificate of proficiency in Russian from Leningrad State University, and a master's degree in teaching from the University of Chicago. After earning her J.D. cum laude from the University of Wisconsin, where she served on the Wisconsin Law Review, she practiced at the firm of Dorsey & Whitney, taught as an adjunct at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, and was an Assistant Hennepin County Public Defender. A judge in that county since 1990, serving in many judicial divisions, she's been Presiding Judge of the Probate/Mental Health Court since 2007. Marilyn's also sat on appeals panels by appointment of the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Her awards are numerous; for example, she was a co-recipient of the Minnesota Trial Judge of the Year-2004, given by the Minnesota Board of Trial Advocates, and the 1995 Marvelous Minnesota Woman Award by then-Governor Arne Carlson.

She's also active in numerous professional organizations, among them: Publications Officer for the Section of International Law of the American Bar Association and past C0-Chair of 2 ABA committees, on United Nations International Institutions and on International Criminal Law.

Those last positions point to the topic of Marilyn's post: her experience while on leave from 2002-2003, having been chosen by the United Nations to serve as an international judge in Kosovo, then a province of Serbia under U.N. administration. As she discusses in her guest post below, her duties included hearing cases alleging war crimes, organized crime, ethnically motivated disputes, and trafficking of human beings. (Her complete presentation is forthcoming in ASIL-published Proceedings, as with those of the 1st Dialogs, available here.)

Marilyn dedicates her post to Dr. Alison Des Forges (left), the human rights investigator who died in February, at age 66, in a plane crash outside Buffalo, New York. (photo credit) Des Forges, as posted, was the subject of a moving tribute by American Society of International Law Executive Director Elizabeth Andersen at this year's IHL Dialogs. Our own post soon after Des Forges' passing detailed the essential role that Des Forges played in Prosecutor v. Akayesu (1998), in her capacity as an expert witness and historian who worked as a Senior Advisor for the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. In addition to her contribution to that 1st trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, we noted,

Des Forges also gave expert testimony in national courts, the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity, and the national legislatures of Belgium, France, and the United States. She published Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda the year after the Akayesu judgment, and also won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for her work as, to use MacArthur words, a 'Human Rights Leader.'

Today Des Forges joins other transnational foremothers in IntLawGrrls' honor roll just below our "visiting from ..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

Victims of Buffalo plane crash

Among the 50 persons killed Thursday night when an airliner struck a house near Buffalo, New York, were 2 women whose passing we honor below. Unlike some of us IntLawGrrls, I never met Alison Des Forges or Beverly Eckert. Many of us will remember the mark that each woman left on our world.

Alison Des Forges

The 1st genocide conviction after an international trial was issued by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on September 2, 1998, in the case of a Rwandan bourgmestre, Jean-Paul Akayesu. That milestone -- IntLawGrrl Susana SáCouto discussed the Akayesu judgment in a post just 2 days ago -- owed much to the work of Dr. Alison Des Forges (right).
Genocide charges turned on this question: Did the victims of the 1994 massacres in Rwanda -- mostly Tutsi -- belong to a protected "national, ethnical, racial or religious group" notwithstanding that they shared nationality, language, religion, culture, and customs with their Hutu killers? Essential to the ICTR's answer in the affirmative was the expert testimony of Des Forges, a historian who worked as a Senior Advisor for the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. Among the judgment's many mentions of Des Forges occurs in para. 5.1, where she is quoted at length on the question:

'The primary criterion for [defining] an ethnic group is the sense of belonging to that ethnic group. It is a sense which can shift over time. In other words, the group, the definition of the group to which one feels allied may change over time. But, if you fix any given moment in time, and you say, how does this population divide itself, then you will see which ethnic groups are in existence in the minds of the participants at that time. The Rwandans currently, and for the last generation at least, have defined themselves in terms of these three ethnic groups. In addition reality is an interplay between the actual conditions and peoples' subjective perception of those conditions. In Rwanda, the reality was shaped by the colonial experience which imposed a categorisation which was probably more fixed, and not completely appropriate to the scene. But, the Belgians did impose this classification in the early 1930's when they required the population to be registered according to ethnic group. The categorisation imposed at that time is what people of the current generation have grown up with. They have always thought in terms of these categories, even if they did not, in their daily lives have to take cognizance of that. This practice was continued after independence by the First Republic and the Second Republic in Rwanda to such an extent that this division into three ethnic groups became an absolute reality'.

Des Forges also gave expert testimony in national courts, the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity, and the national legislatures of Belgium, France, and the United States. She published Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda the year after the Akayesu judgment, and also won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for her work as, to use MacArthur words, a "Human Rights Leader."
Des Forges died Thursday in the plane crash near Buffalo. She was 66 years old.