In passing: Ellen L. Lutz

Ellen L. Lutz, an international human rights lawyer, teacher, and activist, died this past Thursday, November 4, at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The cause was metastatic breast cancer. She was 55.
During her final two years battling the disease, Ellen (near right) directed the Cambridge-based human rights organization Cultural Survival, co-edited two pioneering books (Prosecuting Heads of State, (Cambridge U. Press) and Human Rights and Conflict Management in Context (Syracuse U. Press), submitted formal reviews on state behavior to the UN Human Rights Council, led international litigation on behalf of Panama’s threatened Nobe Indians, and sang alto with the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus. She did each with equal enthusiasm and skill.
Her concern for human rights began when, as a 15-year-old exchange student to Uruguay, she witnessed the onset of Uruguay’s state sponsored “Dirty War,” and supported the international human rights movements such actions spawned across Latin American during the 1970s. After graduating Summa Cum Laude from Temple University (1976) and obtaining a Master’s Degree in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr (1978), Ellen took a Law Degree in International Law and Human Rights from Boalt Hall Law School (University of California at Berkeley) in 1985.
Ellen’s persistent interest in Latin America continued as professional work with Amnesty International (1979-81), in Washington, D.C., and in San Francisco.
She later headed the California office of Human Rights Watch (1989-94), where she conducted research and published on little-known but extensive human rights abuses in Mexico, and she was co-counsel in two groundbreaking human rights cases in U.S. courts, against the infamous Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and Argentine General Suarez-Mason.
Moving with her family to Westborough, Massachusetts, in 1994, she helped to set up and then served as Executive Director of the Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, taught international law. human rights, and mediation at Tufts, Harvard and the University of Massachusetts, and wrote widely. One of her students, now a professor at Occidental College, recalled how

warm and desirous she was of connecting to students amid the formal Fletcher iciness, a marvelous force of nature.

Ellen was asked to become Executive Director of Cultural Survival in 2004, where she increased the participation of indigenous people on the Board of Directors and Program Council, while steering the organization away from local development projects to broad human rights initiatives. Ellen said:

Development work like building schools, digging wells, and providing services is what governments should be doing. Our work is to make sure governments live up to their obligations.

One of her colleagues wrote,

It would be difficult to quantify Ellen’s ferocious passion for justice. Her zeal and natural warm-heartedness combined with a legal rigor that made her a truly formidable advocate.

There was much of such personal and professional praise. But, perhaps the most encompassing and, for Ellen, meaningful compliment came from Stella Tamang, a Nepalese tribal leader and friend:

To Ellen, my Kalyana Mitra,
In Buddhism Kalyana means Wellbeing and Mitra means friend. Kalyana Mitra therefore means friends who always think about their wellbeing. You have been such wonderful friend, a constant support during the problems I was facing about the political problem back in Nepal. We also talked about family, our children, and life. I am blessed to have a friend like you. We believe that if a person has done good Karma, he or she gets to meet with wonderful people, and you are the one for me...

And Ellen was not a Buddhist. Ellen is survived by her husband, Theodore Macdonald, an anthropologist previously with Cultural Survival and now with Harvard University, and her two children from a previous marriage, David and Julia Randall, now studying at the University of Massachusetts and Harvard, respectively. Her cat, Misty, and dog, Churi, are well taken care of. Her friends, among them many women human rights lawyers, are grateful to her for her wise counsel and unflagging dignity. All are thankful to their Kalyana Mitra.

Really big news about global justice

The last few weeks seem to indicate that international courts are getting some teeth, or, at least, are teething ...
► First, the International Criminal Court’s Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, gets Belgium to arrest Jean-Pierre Bemba, the loser in the 2006 presidential election in the Democratic Republic of Congo and head of one of the more infamous militias in that country. Perhaps to avoid charges of political meddling in DRC politics, Bemba has been charged at the ICC (left) not with crimes at home, but with involvement in mass rapes in the next-door Central African Republic.
► Then the ICC Prosecutor really gets serious, issuing an indictment for the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir. (IntLawGrrls posts below, here, here, and here.) That should take some of the wind out of the sails of those ICC skeptics who pointedly asked why, after a nearly 3-year investigation, the ICC had managed only the indictments of a mid-level militia commander and a single Sudanese minister. They asked: Was the Prosecutor focusing just on non-state actors rather than powerful state figures? The Al-Bashir indictment is Moreno-Ocampo’s answer. But it leads to another question: Will the U.N. Security Council use the leverage Moreno-Ocampo has given it to push for real concessions from the Sudanese government, or will it squander the chance?
► Finally, Radovan Karadžić has come in from the cold; he's due to appear in court at The Hague today. (Prior IntLawGrrls post here.) The onetime self-proclaimed president of the Bosnian Serb Republic was arrested by his erstwhile Serbian ex-backers. They are now apparently more interested in securing for Serbia a place in the European Union than in thumbing their nose at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (right).
So far, so good. But it is still true that prosecutions by international courts of high-ranking military and government officials remain few and far between.
The really interesting story is the rise in national-level prosecutions of such officials:
► In the same few weeks, Alberto Fujimori (on whose extradition IntLawGrrls posted here) continued to stand trial in Peru, with military officers confirming that the former president indeed knew of the killings carried out in the name of combating subversion. Fujimori, like Slobodan Milosevic, had delayed the proceedings due to ill-health, but trial is now scheduled to be completed by the fall.
► Then, Argentine courts convicted the Butcher of Córdoba, Benjamín Meléndez, of orchestrating killings and secret death camps during the 1976-83 dictatorship. Since the country’s Supreme Court annulled prior amnesty laws, courts have convicted a number of the top military and police officials, and even a military priest accused of abetting torture. Trials continue throughout the country.
► Next door in Chile, the head of the secret police and his henchmen were convicted of blowing up General Carlos Prats, the former army head, and his wife, in a 1974 bombing in Buenos Aires. And that’s just on one continent. (credit for Chilean Supreme Court photo below left)
Indeed, according to a soon-to-be-published book on trying heads of state, edited by Ellen Lutz and Caitlin Reiger, since 1990, no fewer than 57 heads of state from around the globe have been indicted, at a minimum, for misconduct while in office. True, about half these are corruption cases, not violations of human rights or humanitarian law. True as well, in far fewer cases do the indictments turn into trials and convictions, and fewer still result in actual prison stints. Nonetheless, there is clearly a trend, and it points to the diffuse – but key – influence of the new architecture of international justice on national judges and courts.
That’s the really big news.