Go On! IntLawGrrls @ 4th IHL Dialogs

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

Delighted to announce that IntLawGrrls again will cosponsor the International Humanitarian Law Dialogs at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, not far from another cosponsor, the Robert H. Jackson Center.

The theme of this year's 4th annual Dialogs, to be held August 29 to 31, is timely given the outcome of the International Criminal Court Review Conference in Uganda. IntLawGrrls wrote a Kampala series of posts about that conference, as well as a crime of aggression series about a key conference outcome, the adoption of provisions designed to make the crime punishable by the ICC.

The Dialogs' theme, in short, is: Crimes Against Peace - Aggression in the 21st Century.

Exploring it will be prosecutors from international criminal fora, plus many international criminal law scholars. (Prior IntLawGrrls posts.) Last year was a great opportunity to meet such colleagues at Chautauqua, a picturesque lakefront venue. It was also the source of 2 IntLawGrrls guest contributions: a trilogy of posts by Judge Patricia M. Wald (here, here, and here), plus a post by Judge Marilyn J. Kaman (here).

Many present and former international prosecutors are expected to take part this year. In addition to those mentioned as specific speakers in the program that follows, prosecutors set to attend include the following from the:

► International Criminal Court, Deputy Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (left);

► International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, former prosecutor H.W. William Caming;

► Special Court for Sierra Leone, Chief Prosecutor Brenda Hollis (below right), recently in the news for calling a supermodel to testify at the ongoing Hague trial about diamonds received from defendant Charles Taylor, former President of Liberia, and former Chief Prosecutor David M. Crane, the founder of the Dialogs who's now a Professor of Law at Syracuse University, another cosponsor, and the founder of the Dialogs;

► Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia: Co-Prosecutor Andrew T. Cayley and former Co-Prosecutor Robert Petit; and
► International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and for the former Yugoslavia, former Chief Prosecutor Richard J. Goldstone.

Sessions on the current program include:

Sunday, August 29

► Showing of War Don Don, an award-winning HBO Documentary film about a Special Court trial in Sierra Leone, moderated by filmmaker Rebecca Richman Cohen (left).

Monday, August 29

► Keynote speech by Benjamin B. Ferencz, formerly a prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and a lifelong activist on behalf of international criminal justice, introduced by Professor Michael P. Scharf of Case Western Reserve University School of Law, another cosponsor.

► Updates from all the current prosecutors, moderated by Professor John Q. Barrett, St. John's University School of Law.

► Keynote speech by Judge Hans-Peter Kaul, 2d Vice President of the International Criminal Court, introduced by Leila Nadya Sadat, an IntLawGrrl guest/alumna who contributed to our Kampala series, and Director of the Whitney R. Harris Institute at the Washington University School of Law, another Dialogs cosponsor.

► Dialog on the crime of aggression, with Ferencz, John Washburn, Convener of the American Non-Governmental Organizations Coalition for the International Criminal Court, and William R. Pace, Convenor of the Coalition for an International Criminal Court, moderated by Professor David J. Scheffer of Northwestern University School of Law, formerly U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes.
► Keynote address by Stephen J. Rapp, currently the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, and formerly the Chief Prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, introduced by David Sullivan of Enough Project, another cosponsoring organization.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

► Year in Review -- International Criminal Law, by IntLawGrrl Valerie Oosterveld (left), a Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Western Ontario, and frequent contributor to our Kampala series.

► Keynote speech by Professor William Schabas, Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland, Galway.

► Issuance of the 4th Chautauqua Declaration & Conclusion of Dialogs, hosted by IntLawGrrl Diane Marie Amann (yours truly, also a Kampala series contributor), Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, wearing my hat as a Vice President of the American Society of International Law, another cosponsor of the IHL Dialogs.

For more information, contact Carol Drake at cdrake@roberthjackson.org.

Happy 3d birthday to us! Again.

Today we IntLawGrrls celebrate our 2d 3d birthday.
Huh?
Well, in an unintended display of math anxiety, this founder/'Grrl declared it our golden birthday on this day a year ago -- that is, said then that we'd juist turned 3 on the 3d day of the 3d month. In fact, though we were entering our 3d year, it had only been 2 years since the launch of this blog on "international law, policy, practice." But no one called us on the arithmetic error, and so today we get to celebrate gold all over again.
Since we announced our birth on what folks in Japan marked as Girls Day 2007, we've grown like Topsy.
We're proud cosponsors of 2 autumn conferences -- 2009 and, yet to come, 2010.
We're proud that 'Grrls have been invited to speak at other conferences, to contribute scholarship, blog posts, and op-eds, on account of their work here.
Contributing more than 3,000 posts have been nearly 3 dozen permanent IntLawGrrls voices, plus more than 100 women who've joined us as guests. 'Grrls and guests/alumnae have ties to nearly 2 dozen countries in our world. As listed in full in our righthand column, we include, to name a very few, distinguished presidents Lucy Reed and Hélène Ruiz Fabri, distinguished scholars like Mireille Delmas-Marty and Hilary Charlesworth (and so many others), distinguished diplomat Diane Orentlicher, distinguished judges Patricia M. Wald and Marilyn J. Kaman, and distinguished U.N. expert Gay McDougall. And we've been proud over the years to honor no fewer than 70 transnational foremothers -- women who've inspired us, from "A" (Alice Paul) to "V" (Virginia Leary).
To all our contributors and all our readers -- today we will pass the milestone of 400,000 viewings since our founding! -- heartfelt thanks. We look forward to a Year 4 future of sharing lots more good things.

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!

Internationalized judging in Kosovo

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the invitation to contribute this guest post on my service as an international judge in Kosovo)

When NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo ended with the United Nations assuming interim civilian administration in that province of Serbia, my only understanding of the events was intellectual, gleaned from reading the morning newspaper before I began my day as a judge in Minnesota. Yet three years later, I found myself on a plane bound for Kosovo to help rebuild a destroyed justice system.
On arrival (left), I was posted to a city called Peć/Peja. Or is it Peja/Peć? These are two names, one Serbian and one Albanian, and the order in which you say them supposedly signifies a bias or preference.
It would be difficult being an impartial international judge in Kosovo, where every move was scrutinized.
The foundation for my work was laid by another woman, in the aftermath of another war. The woman was Eleanor Roosevelt, who played an instrumental role in drafting the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is worth noting that although the U.N. General Assembly voted unanimously in favor, certain countries abstained, taking exception with UDHR’s guarantee of freedom in marriage. I would encounter the force of that exception a half-century later.
I took part in “internationalized justice”: in contrast with ad hoc bodies such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, we international judges sat in Kosovo’s domestic courts alongside local judges, in the hope of bringing a measure of impartiality to the outcome.
The stories of two women tell much about my experience in Kosovo.
Almost immediately upon arrival in Pec/Peja, I came to know the 1st woman, Haxjere Sahiti.
She had been married on Sunday and murdered on Monday. The 20-year-old Kosovar Albanian woman died from seven gunshots, in her family’s living room. The killer was her brother; the murder was witnessed by her mother and brother.
Her crime was supposedly not being a virgin.
Under traditional Albanian cultural code, a bride may be returned to her family if she “is not as she should be” on her wedding night – or the groom may kill her, with a bullet traditionally given him by the bride’s father.
Upon exhumation of Haxjere’s body, it was determined that she had been a virgin, after all.
The international police, with whom I worked, investigated this crime and tried to find the killer. But no one wanted to give information. To talk to police or the courts would violate notions of maintaining family “honor.” To do so would mean that the potential witness (or their family) would “pay” – with their lives – for the information given. Haxjere’s family professed to know nothing.
As an international judge in Kosovo, I was asked to sit on politically sensitive cases – of war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnically motivated disputes, trafficking in drugs and human beings, genocide. I also acted as an investigative judge – more akin to a prosecutor in the United States – and determined whether sufficient evidence existed to charge someone with a crime. I faced many unconventional obstacles that necessarily exist in a mission environment. With Haxjere Sahiti’s case, I confronted an obstacle new to me – that cultural norms dictate both what a “permissible honor killing” is and the silencing of witnesses.
Yet another obstacle in the case of the 2d woman, Sabahate Tolaj.
Sabahate was 35 years old. She was not married and had no children, and had completed the Aviation School in Sarajevo. During the 1999 war in Kosovo, she had been a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Under UNMIK, the United Nations' Mission in Kosovo, Sabahate was a Kosovo Police Service officer in Peja, investigating high-profile murders and referring the investigations to international judges like me. Sabahate and I had numerous conversations and we felt a particular kinship with one another.
One day I asked about her safety. You see, I had bodyguards, and she did not. Sabahate just shrugged and said:

'This is what I do. I enjoy it. And it is the right thing to do. So, I do not worry.'

On November 24, 2003, at 7:45 in the morning, a “drive-by” assassination took place. Sabahate and another officer were killed; the third survived his wounds. After nearly four years of investigations and court hearings – justice comes slowly – the convictions were read out in Peja District Court. Bedri Krasniqi was sentenced to twenty-seven years for double murder; the other accused were acquitted for insufficient evidence.
Sabahate was killed only a couple of months after I returned home. My sadness over her death is still present.
An all-too-familiar postscript: Double murderer escapes Kosovo prison, wire services reported on December 1, 2008, adding, “nine member of the correctional services were held on suspicion that they helped” Sabahate’s killer get away.
My time as an international judge in Kosovo has had a profound impact upon me. In answer to the question often asked of me, here are some of the things I learned:
► To be by myself. In an apartment without reliable heat and electricity, one has time to think.
► How much I cherish my family and friends, at home and in Kosovo. (If you see my husband, tap him on the shoulder and say, “I think she is grateful for all the support you gave her.”)
► International law. If murder was a familiar legal concept to me, war crimes and crimes against humanity were not. Now I am passionate about learning this new body of law.
► Cultural norms can find their way into the courtroom, and have an impact upon guilt or innocence.
► Not everyone wants to reestablish the rule of law. Some will kill innocent police officers toward their end.
► Rendering verdicts was important, but inculcating a belief in the rule of law was more abiding than any one verdict I rendered.
► Each one of us can do our part in advancing the cause of international justice for women, and children and men, and in bringing to life the values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The 3d IHL Dialogs

As readers will recall from this post, IntLawGrrls and the American Society of International Law were among the proud cosponsors of the Third Annual International Humanitarian Law Dialogs (above), held last week in Chautauqua, New York.

The IHL Dialogs provide the opportunity for international criminal prosecutors –- from as long ago as Nuremberg through the (all too many) present-day criminal tribunals –- to exchange ideas privately, to meet with other international humanitarian law scholars and practitioners, to recharge their batteries, and to share programs with the public. It is a small public, as the 135-year-old Chautauqua Institution, a lovely upstate community beside the lake of the same name, generously opens its doors to us sat the end of its nine-week season of lectures, concerts, classes, and recreation programs.
This year the theme was “Honoring Women in International Criminal Law: From Nuremberg to the ICC.” It is no exaggeration that this theme arose with IntLawGrrls founder Diane Marie Amann, who (diplomatically) blogged in 2007 about the absence of women prosecutors at the First International Humanitarian Law Dialogs. David Crane, the main force behind the Dialogs and the first prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, replied at once with a comment. The choice of this year's theme indicates that he heard Diane loud and clear.

The Dialogs were preceded by a reception at the Robert H. Jackson Center in nearby Jamestown. Gracing this reception was onetime Nuremberg Prosecutor H.W. William Caming (above right, talking with me), who had not attended the first two Dialogs. He honored his fellow former Nuremberg prosecutor, Henry T. King Jr., who had spoken so movingly last year and passed away at age 89 this spring.
We IntLawGrrls – and our friends – were well represented:

► Diane gave a keynote lecture that arose out of her “Women at Nuremberg” blog series (below). She illustrated her talk with fascinating photographs, found painstakingly in archives, as well as personal history about the women, found even more painstakingly. (Be sure to read the text, in the Proceedings to be published by ASIL.)

► Professor Leila Nadya Sadat of Washington University School of Law chaired a panel of current prosecutors, ICC Deputy Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, ICTY Deputy Prosecutor Norman Farrell, SCSL Deputy Prosecutor Joseph Kamara, and ICTR prosecutor Alphonse Van.

► As depicted below, IntLawGrrl Kelly Askin of the Open Society Justice Initiative chaired a panel composed of current and former women prosecutors; from right to left, Renifa Madenga of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Christine H. Chung of the International Criminal Court, and Lesley Taylor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

► ASIL Executive Director Betsy Andersen gave a eulogy for Alison Des Forges, the Human Rights Watch researcher, and closed the Dialogs by reading aloud the prosecutors' Third Chautauqua Declaration of the prosecutors, reprinted below.

► Yours truly introduced the keynote dinner speaker, Patricia M. Wald, former ICTY Judge and Chief Judge of the District of Columbia Circuit (among many other things), who spoke about what women victims need and expect from the international criminal tribunals.

►Former ICC prosecutor Chung, in addition to serving on the panel described above, introduced one keynote luncheon speaker, Siri Frignard, a current Norwegian international criminal prosecutor and a former East Timor prosecutor.

► Other keynoters were Minnesota State Judge Marilyn J. Kaman, who served as an international judge for the U.N. Mission in Kosovo; John Q. Barrett, who spoke about Katherine B. Fite, the (perhaps) leading woman lawyer at Nuremberg; and Eli Rosenbaum of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations.

The panels and talks went hand-in-hand with opportunities for the prosecutors, IntLawGrrls, ASIL membersm and others to chat over a meal, on a walk, or while rocking on the front porch of the century-old Athaeneum Hotel.
As a sponsor, IntLawGrrls thanks all the other sponsors and organizers, especially Professor Crane, the Syracuse University College of Law, and Impunity Watch; Greg Peterson, Chair of the Jackson Center, and his family; Adam Bratton, Executive Director of the Jackson Center; Carol Drake, who makes everything run at the Jackson Center; Professor Sadat and Washington University's Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute; and Professor Michael Scharf and Case Western's Frederick K. Cox International Law Center, and organizer of the glorious post-conference cruise on Lake Chautauqua.

Go On! IntLawGrrls cosponsors 3d IHL Dialogs, on "Women in International Criminal Law"

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest) Delighted to announce that for the 1st time ever, IntLawGrrls is cosponsoring an international law conference!
It's the 3d Annual International Humanitarian Law Dialogs, to be held August 31-September 1 at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, a community near Buffalo in upstate New York.
As posted here and here, last year's dialogs marked the 60th anniversary of the Convention Against Genocide; the 1st year, the 100th anniversary of the 1907 Hague Rules on the laws of war. This year's theme -- "Honoring Women in International Criminal Law From Nuremberg to the ICC" -- is ready-made for IntLawGrrls the world over. It's no surprise, then, that a number of 'Grrls were enlisted as the event was put together by our colleague David M. Crane, formerly Prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, now law professor at Syracuse University College of Law.
Our thanks to David, who's also the founder Impunity Watch blog (one of the "connections" in our righthand column), both for the invitation and for welcoming IntLawGrrls blog as a cosponsor. Also cosponsoring are the Robert H. Jackson Center in nearby Jamestown, N.Y., which features the work of the Supreme Court Justice who served as Chief U.S. Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial of the Major War Criminals, Impunity Watch/Syracuse Law, the American Society of International Law, the Enough Project of the Center for American Progress, the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University School of Law, and the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
Events on the program include:
Monday, August 31:
► Opening remarks, including a moment of silence for Dr. Alison Des Forges, the Human Rights Watch researcher who died in a plane crash this past February, as we then posted.
►Keynote lecture entitled "Katherine Fite, A Prosecutor at Nuremberg," by John Q. Barrett, Professor of Law at St. John's University School of Law, New York, and Elizabeth S. Lenna Fellow at the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, New York. As Barrett will detail, Katherine Boardman Fite, who'd received her law degree from Yale in 1930, served as Jackson's assistant.
► Keynote lecture entitled "Women at Nuremberg," by me, IntLawGrrl Diane Marie Amann, Professor of Law and Director of the California International Law Center at King Hall, University of California, Davis, School of Law, and an ASIL Vice President. The presentation will be based on my IntLawGrrls series of the same name.
► An update from the current prosecutors, to be moderated by Leila Nadya Sadat, Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law and Director of the Harris Institute at Washington University School of Law, St. Louis. That institute's namesake, former Nuremberg prosecutor Whitney R. Harris, also is expected to attend these 3d annual dialogs.
► Luncheon speech by Gayle E. Smith (left), a cofounder of the Enough Project who's now a Special Assistant to President Barack Obama. Introducing her will be Colin Thomas-Jensen, a policy advisor at the Enough Project.
► Roundtable discussion with the prosecutors on "Gender Crimes at the International Level," moderated by IntLawGrrl Diane Orentlicher, Professor of Law at American University's Washington College of the Law.
► A briefing by Sadat on the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative about which IntLawGrrls has posted here and here.
► Dinner speech by the Honorable Patricia M. Wald (right), formerly Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and, subsequently, a Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Introducing Judge Wald will be IntLawGrrl Lucy Reed, ASIL President, Freshfields partner, and a member of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission, about which she's posted.
► Showing of NBC's The Wanted, with members of the cast.
Tuesday, September 1:
► "International Criminal Law Year in Review," presented by Michael P. Scharf, Professor of Law and Director of the Cox Center.
► "Reflections on Women in International Criminal Law," by the Honorable Marilyn J. Kaman (below right), Presiding Judge, Probate/Mental Health Court, Hennepin County, Minnesota, and from 2002-2003 a U.N.-appointed judge in Kosovo, where she presided over cases involving war crimes, organized crime, ethnically motivated disputes, and human trafficking.
► Roundtable with 3 women who've worked as international trial attorneys: Christine H. Chung, partner at Quinn Emmanuel and former senior trial attorney, Office of the Prosecutor, International Criminal Court (prior post); Lesley Taylor, Special Court for Sierra Leone; and Renifa Madenga, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Moderated by Dr. Kelly Askin, IntLawGrrl and Senior Legal Officer, International Justice, Open Society Justice Initiative.
► Lunch speech by Siri Frigaard (above left), Chief Public Prosecutor, Norwegian National Authority for Prosecution of Organised and Other Serious Crime. Former ICC attorney Chung will introduce her.
► Elizabeth Andersen, ASIL Executive Director, will lead the signing of the 3d Chautauqua Declaration.
Prosecutors expected to attend, besides those already named, include: Fatou Bensouda (below left), ICC Deputy Prosecutor (prior posts here and here); William Caming, former trial counsel at Nuremberg; Desmond DeSilva, former Prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone; Richard Goldstone, formerly the ICTY-ICTR Chief Prosecutor and a Justice on the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and currently leading a U.N. inquiry into the 2008-2009 conflict in the Gaza Strip; Hassan Jallow, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda; Robert Petit, Co-Prosecutor of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia; and Stephen Rapp, Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone since 2006, and now, as we've posted, President Barack Obama's nominee to become the U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues.
For details, contact Carol Drake at cdrake@roberthjackson.org.