Work

All of the difficulties aside, I absolutely LOVE my internship! I was assigned to an appeals team (ALAD) in the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) (note the UN’s excessive use of acronyms). My two supervisors are the team leader and her senior advisor, who are Swedish and Canadian women, respectively. They are both really amazing, super competent women. (Yesterday I watched them take on a whole room of men criticizing their brief and they basically took them all down. It was awesome.) They are both also very nice, make me feel a part of the team, are always open for questions, and actually ask for and respect my input. They are also both mothers of young children and happily married career women, which makes me think that maybe being a woman lawyer does not necessarily preclude having some sort of personal life.

Right now we are working on an appeal for the Zigiranyirazo case. Ziggy is the brother-in-law of the assassinated Rwandan President Habyarimana and was an integral member of the akazu, which was the clique of Hutu political elites in Rwanda who planned and orchestrated the genocide. (As a creepy side note, just a few years before the genocide occurred, he was studying in Montreal and apparently had an altercation with a Tutsi man in the Montreal metro.) At trial he was found guilty of genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity, and not guilty of conspiracy to commit genocide, complicity in genocide, and murder as a crime against humanity. He was sentenced to 20 years.

The interesting thing about the ICTR trials is that the prosecutor can’t just get up and say “This person planned and was involved in the genocide” and then tell the story of what happened in Rwanda. The accused needs to be charged with specific crimes related to specific events during the genocide (for example, the massacre of several thousand Tutsi at one particular location on one particular day) and then needs to provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused was involved. This is why, for example, Ziggy could be found guilty of genocide but not of conspiracy to commit genocide, because although basically everyone knows he conspired, the prosecution couldn’t provide enough evidence to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that he attended meetings where the genocide was planned. The trial becomes very technical, and can hinge on small details like what he did or did not say at a certain roadblock at a specific time.

Both the prosecution and the defence appealed this decision and since I have arrived I have been helping with the response to the defence’s appellant brief. Since I am working in appeals, I mostly look at previous ICTR and ICTY (Y = Yugoslavia) judgements to find legal arguments against the defence position. This is really interesting from an international criminal law point of view, and is good practice in legal research and argumentation.

Since appeals tend to be bigger picture issues, however, sometimes it is easy to forget I am working on a genocide case at all. A fellow intern, who works in defence at the trial level, on the other hand, spent a whole day reading witness statements from a young girl who had had both of her arms cut off, and basically broke down at the end of the day. So from a mental health point of view, my assignment is very fortunate, but I find I need to remind myself just how awful the crimes people like Ziggy committed in order to “stay hungry” as the Chief Prosecutor Hassan Jallow put it.

It would also be pretty cool to get sent on a fact-finding mission to Rwanda as a couple of lucky interns at the trial level have been able to do. One intern told me about interviewing a witness on the side of the road as he pretended to give them directions so that he wouldn’t be seen talking to ICTR people. (I edited out the rest of this post because I probably write too much...)