Lawyers Beyond Borders: Advancing International Human Rights Through Local Laws and Courts PDF
Preview Lawyers Beyond Borders: Advancing International Human Rights Through Local Laws and Courts
Lawyers Beyond Borders LAWYERS BEYOND BORDERS Advancing International Human Rights Through Local Laws and Courts Maria Armoudian University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Copyright © 2021 by Maria Armoudian All rights reserved For questions or permissions, please contact [email protected] Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid- free paper First published September 2021 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data has been applied for. ISBN 978- 0- 472- 13256- 0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978- 0- 472- 12904- 1 (e- book) ISBN 978-0-472-03885-5 (paper: alk. paper) Contents Foreword vii Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii ONE Lawyers Beyond Borders: Introduction and Overview 1 TWO The Seeds of a Rights Revolution 18 THREE Litigation as Recovery: The Birth of the Center for Justice and Accountability 35 FOUR The Burmese Connection 51 FIVE Rights and Redress in a “War on Terror” 72 SIX Private Military Profits and the Search for Justice 90 SEVEN The New Impunity 109 EIGHT The Globalization of Justice 125 NINE Retrauma and Resilience: The Dynamics of Clients and Counsel 145 TEN The Making, Unmaking, and Remaking of a Rights Revolution 158 vi Contents Notes 163 Bibliography 213 Index 235 Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10038981 Foreword This book is a story of creativity and hope and lawyers fighting for justice. It is a story of how a relatively small group of attorneys devised a strategy for representing victims of atrocities and human rights abuses across the world. It is a story of how they developed legal theories that never had been tried before to help victims and to prevent violations of rights in the future. It is a story of their victories and also their frustration as an increasingly conservative Supreme Court repeatedly has slammed the courthouse doors closed for such cases. As the dean of a law school, I also tell my students at commencement about the power they will have as lawyers. I remind them that as lawyers, they will have the chance for tremendous power: to take away lives or to save them; to protect freedom or to compromise it; to protect our environ- ment or aid in defiling it; to help companies do good things or to help them do bad things. This book tells about both kinds of lawyers. It is primarily about the attorneys who dedicated their lives and their careers to helping victims of human rights abuses. It tells of their enormous ingenuity in bringing suits and fighting as hard as they could for justice. It tells of how they used a statute adopted in the late 18th century, the Alien Tort Statute, to sue on behalf of the victims of horrific abuse in the late 20th and early 21st centu- ries. But it also tells how corporations fought back, using all their resources to keep such suits from going forward and ultimately to greatly narrow this important law. Laws are meaningless unless they are enforced. Human rights, too, are viii Foreword merely words on paper unless there are courts to apply them and give them redress. Victims of rights violations deserve to be compensated. And com- pensation is essential to deter violations for the future. That, of course, is the premise of all liability in the legal system and it is why suits for human rights violations are so important. It is also why what the Supreme Court has done to the Alien Tort Statute in so limiting its use is so awful and so important. If the United States courts are not available for victims to sue, there likely will be no forum in the world. As I read this wonderful book, I realized that I want all my law stu- dents, and all students and prospective law students everywhere, to read it. The lawyers described in this book and their efforts fighting for justice for victims of human rights violations are a model for all of us. It shows that through law we really can make a huge difference. It also shows that even if we fail, it is a fight that is so very important. Maria Armoudian’s beautifully written book is a reminder for us all of the power of law and therefore the power of each of us to use it to make the world better. Erwin Chemerinsky Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law University of California, Berkeley School of Law Preface Seventy- plus years after “never again,” the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and subsequent international agreements to end torture and genocide, human rights atrocities have remained a steady fact of life— with little meaningful abatement in sight.1 These aspirational agreements suffer from political, physical, legal, and societal barriers to realization,2 leaving millions of victims “below the law”— beyond the law’s protection— while their offenders too often remain above it. Obviously, things can—a nd do— change. History is rife with such examples— through some combination of ideas, human agency, and struc- tures. Thanks to scholars, we know a bit about how and why they occur.3 In the complicated realm of realizing international human rights, in preventing or redressing atrocities, I hadn’t seen many viable solutions— particularly when violators remained protected by laws of immunity, juris- diction, sovereignty, or more practical issues around power, wealth, or friends in high places. When I learned about US lawyers, using their tool— litigation— in their own land—t he United States—t o bring some restitu- tion to victims in faraway lands, I wanted to understand: How had they come up with these ideas? How did they persuade other lawyers, courts of law, or Congress to support unconventional ideas about redress? How did they influence the legal landscape, and how did the work, in turn, affect the survivors and the advocates themselves? What happens in the slow, dynamic process of making— or trying to make— new pathways to justice? This part of lawmaking includes but transcends the institutions. It is the part of law, the painstaking construction of rights and redress that begins
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