Go On! U.S. refugee law

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia and other events of interest)

The 30th Anniversary of the Refugee Act is the topic of a symposium to be held 10:30 a.m.-2:15 p.m. on November 12, 2010, by the Center for Immigrants' Rights at the Dickinson School of Law, Pennsylvania State University, University Park. (hat tip ImmigrationProf Blog)
Moderating the program will be Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia (below right), Clinical Professor and Center Director. Speakers who will consider the United States' Refugee Act of 1980 in contemporary context include:
► Elizabeth Dallam, Senior Protection Officer at the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees
► Regina Germain, Adjunct Professor at Sturm College of Law, University of Denver, and author of The Asylum Primer (6th ed., 2010)
► Tara Magner, Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University Law Center and Senior Counsel to the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Senator Patrick Leahy
► Jeanne Smoot, Public Policy Director, Tahirih Justice Center, Washington, D.C.
► Anne Sovcik, Advocacy Counsel for Human Rights First's Refugee Protection Program and Chair of the Asylum Working Group
Program here; other details and registration available here.

Guest Blogger: Daphne Eviatar

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Daphne Eviatar (left) as today's guest blogger.
As a New York-based Senior Associate in the Law & Security Program of Human Rights First, Daphne investigates and reports on U.S. national security policies and practices and their human rights implications.
She's both a lawyer and a journalist, having earned degrees at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, New York University School of Law (where she's also taught law & journalism), and Dartmouth College. She was a 2005 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, a 2003 Pew International Journalism fellow at Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies. Following law school, Daphne clerked in San Diego for Judge Irma E. Gonzalez, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, and in Philadelphia for Judge Dolores K. Sloviter, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
She's published widely on law, human rights, and economic developments (prior IntLawGrrls post), as a former legal correspondent for The Washington Independent, also in media such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek International, and Harper's. (Her Huffington Post contributions are available here.) And Daphne's been interviewed by a number of broadcast outlets, including The Rachel Maddow Show.
In her guest post below, Daphne provides a critique of a recent federal appellate decision respecting detainees at the U.S.-run internment facility at Bagram, Afghanistan.
Heartfelt welcome!

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

If the administration is hoping to showcase the strength of its military and the president's tough stance on terrorism, this probably wasn't the best way to do it.

-- Daphne Eviatar (below left), Senior Associate at the Law and Security Program of Human Rights First, concluding a commentary provoked by news that the military commission trial of Omar Khadr, alleged child soldier pictured above right at time of capture years ago, may begin -- "or not" -- this week at Guantánamo.

Guest Blogger: Julie Veroff

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome as a guest blogger Julie Veroff (right), who recently finished her MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Oxford, which she pursued on a Rhodes Scholarship.
Julie is now the Executive Director of FACE AIDS, a non-profit organization dedicated to mobilizing and inspiring young people to fight AIDS and global health inequities. She earned her B.A. with Honors and Distinction from Stanford University in 2007. In the future, Julie plans to go to law school and pursue a career in public service.

Julie first worked in a refugee camp in 2006, when she established a women’s center and leadership training program in Mwange Refugee Camp in Zambia as a Project Facilitator with the nongovernmental organization FORGE. She has since interned with Human Rights First’s refugee protection and lifeline for Iraqi refugees program and at the U.S. Department of State.

Julie became interested in refugees’ access to justice while working in Mwange. Teenage girls often spoke of teachers demanding sex in exchange for good grades. When Julie asked whether they had anyone to report the problem to, they laughed. Her recent research in Meheba Refugee Settlement, Zambia, which formed the basis of the dissertation for which Oxford awarded her distinction, is discussed in her guest post below. Rather than look just at the rules and procedures of justice systems in refugee camps, Julie explored how refugees viewed and interacted with these systems in order to capture the socio-legal aspects of justice administration in a protracted encampment environment.
Heartfelt welcome!

Breaking News...

President Obama announced two key nominations yesterday:

• Michael H. Posner: Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Department of State
  
• Stephen J. Rapp: Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues, Department of State

The bios of both excellent candidates are below. Congrats! Let's hope these nominations are confirmed with more alacrity than some of the earlier posts (namely Dawn Johnsen and Harold Koh).
Michael Posner (below left) currently serves as the President of Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights) and has been at the forefront of the international human rights movement for more than 30 years. Posner has traveled to more than 50 countries in all regions of the world on behalf of Human Rights First and other organizations. He has worked to support human rights defenders in countries as diverse as Russia, Zimbabwe, Iran, Cuba, China, Uganda, Haiti, the Philippines, El Salvador and Egypt. He also has been actively involved in promoting the rights of refugees and displaced people, and has taken a leading role in promoting stronger industry standards to ensure fair labor conditions in global manufacturing supply chains. Posner is a frequent public commentator and his opinion essays have appeared in newspapers and magazines around the country. He also has testified dozens of times before the U.S. Congress on a wide range of human rights and refugee topics. Before joining Human Rights First, Posner was a lawyer with Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal in Chicago. Posner lectured at Yale Law School from 1981 to 1984, and again in 2009. He has been a visiting lecturer at Columbia University Law School since 1984. A member of the California and Illinois Bars, as well as the Council on Foreign Relations, he received his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley Law School (Boalt Hall) and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.
Stephen Rapp (below right) has served as Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone since January 2007, leading the prosecutions of former Liberian President Charles Taylor and other persons alleged to bear the greatest responsibility for the atrocities committed during the civil war in Sierra Leone. From 2001 to 2007, Rapp served as Senior Trial Attorney and Chief of Prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, personally heading the trial team that achieved convictions of the principals of RTLM radio and Kangura newspaper—the first in history for leaders of the mass media for the crime of Incitement to Commit Genocide. Previously, he was United States Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa from 1993 to 2001. Prior to his tenure as U.S. Attorney, he had worked as an attorney in private practice and had served as Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency and as an elected member of the Iowa Legislature. He received his JD degree from Drake University and his BA from Harvard College.
Congrats to both!

1st Gitmo trial begins

After years of litigation that included a trip to the U.S. Supreme Court -- see Hamdan v. Rumsfeld -- a military commission at Guantánamo will hear opening arguments this morning in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan (right). It is the 1st trial for anyone whom the United States captured in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. (Meanwhile, back in Washington, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey called upon Congress to write new rules for detainees who pursue habeas petitions, as the Court last month made clear, in Boumediene v. Bush, that they have a right to do.)
Hamdan, alleged to have been a chauffeur for Osama bin Laden, is charged with the offenses of conspiracy and material support for terrorism. Hamdan entered a plea of not guilty before a military judge yesterday, and a jury of 6 military officers, plus, 1 alternate, quickly was chosen. At least 2/3 of the jury must agree on a verdict. The "trial in a small, windowless courtroom" is expected to last 3 weeks.
On Day 1 the judge issued a split decision on defendant's challenge to the admissibility of statements made during interrogation. Those made at Bagram Air Base and Panshir in Afghanistan cannot be used on account of what the judge called the "'highly coercive environments and conditions under which they were made.'" The judge refused, however, to issue a blanket ban on statements made at Guantánamo, notwithstanding defendant's contention that they too were impermissibly obtained.
The chief prosecutor, Army Col. Lawrence Morris, said that the ruling would not harm its case:

'It does not reduce my confidence in our ability fully to depict Mr. Hamdan's criminality. We're fine.'

And before the ruling, the defense appeared less than confident about the final result:
... Hamdan's military lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, said the trial

'is going to be deficient. It's going to proceed, but . . . there are fundamental flaws in this system. I don't know that I can predict an acquittal.'

Observers from Human Rights First are blogging the Hamdan trial here; the American Civil Liberties Union is set to begin blogging later in the week.

¿Comisión contra la Impunidad, sí o no?

The Los Angeles Times reports that establishment of a Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala "hangs in the balance" as legislators mull whether to go forward or "scrap" the plan.
Agreement between the Guatemalan government and the United Nations was reached 7 months ago at U.N. Headquarters in New York. It would set up an International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, through which U.N.-selected commissioners would work for 2 years. In December the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre reported that "among its functions would be to determine the existence in Guatemala of illegal security forces and clandestine apparati, in order to promote criminal punishment."
The plan has the support not only of the United Nations, but also of the United States. Within Guatemala, supporters include representatives of the Supreme Court, prosecutor's office, and civil society. Among them is the sister of Guatemalan anthropologist Myrna Mack Chang, who, as Human Rights First reported, was killed in 1990 after having "been stalked for two weeks prior to her death by a military death squad" that'd "targeted her in retaliation for her pioneering field work on the destruction of rural indigenous communities." Helen Mack (right), who's fought for more than a decade to bring to justice those responsible for her sister's death, told Prensa Libre in December that establishment of the Commission would be "a step toward breaking up those criminal organizations that have infiltrated the State and that foment impunity and undermine the rule of law."
But opposition was evident even at the time the agreement was reached: Members of Congress were "skeptical," and 1 attorney told Prensa Libre that the delegation of prosecutorial authority to a foreign body was unconstitutional. That depletion-of-sovereignty argument persuaded "a key congressional committee" to oppose the Commission, the Times reports. (That vote drew criticism from the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee chair, Patrick Leahy.) On Wednesday, Guatemala's full legislature will consider the plan.