Activities Roundup: May–October 2009

INTERNATIONAL

Publication Examines Challenges of Ensuring Fair Trails for Former Heads of State
The Justice Initiative in September published Tyrants on Trial: Keeping Order in the Courtroom which looks at trials involving heads of state and other leaders accountable for gross abuses of human rights. According to the publication, these trials pose particular challenges for judges and prosecutors, especially when former leaders defend themselves, often by attacking the court while simultaneously treating it as a platform for lengthy espousals of their broad political and ideological views. Author Patricia M. Wald, who previously served as the chief judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and also as a judge for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, drew on her personal experiences as well as those of other judges and trial participants to provide insightful lessons learned and practical recommendations on the scope of the charges, judicial control of proceedings, self-representation, and media relations.

The Faces of the Stateless
The Open Society Institute in September launched a web feature on the stories of stateless people from around the world. The site features an interview with Justice Initiative executive director James A. Goldston about the global problem and features the work of the Justice Initiative in the Dominican Republic and Mauritania. Designed to explain and contextualize the issue, the site explains who is stateless and how people are deprived of their nationality; calls for better documentation of the situation of some 15 million stateless people around the world; and urges increased efforts by governments and international organizations to develop norms that protect people from becoming stateless, and limit states' discretion in denying citizenship to individuals or groups of people.

Human Rights Fellows Begin Studies in Budapest
In September, 10 Justice Initiative fellows started a two-year human rights program at the Central European University in Budapest. The fellowship supports human rights efforts around the world by increasing the number of lawyers in the field, improving advocates' legal skills, and strengthening the capacity of local organizations working on the front lines. This year's fellows hail from China, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Philippines, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leona. In July, the previous year's fellows finished their studies in Budapest and returned to their home countries of China, Jordan, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and Uganda in order to begin a year of practical work experience.

AFRICA

Campaign to Protect Human Rights Workers in The Gambia
After a September television address in which President Yahya Jammeh of The Gambia explicitly threatened to kill human rights workers in his country, the Justice Initiative and its partners launched a campaign to ensure their safety. President Jammeh's threat was particularly troubling because his government is accused of procuring the killing, disappearance, or exile of scores of journalists, and because human rights workers from across the continent and beyond must regularly enter The Gambia, as its capital, Banjul, is the seat of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights. An op-ed by the Justice Initiative was published in The Guardian calling on the African Union and the African Commission to demand a retraction from President Jammeh and immediately relocate the commission's headquarters. In October, the commission issued a resolution calling on its parent body, the African Union, to intervene and requesting that the next session be held outside of The Gambia in the event that President Jammeh refused to withdraw his threats.

Nigerian Advocates Launch Right to Know Initiative
After an epic and often frustrating decade-long effort to sign a Freedom of Information bill into law in Nigeria, a broad civil society collation in July launched the Right to Know Initiative—a newly established nongovernmental organization working on issues including government transparency and access to information—with the support of the National Human Rights Commission and the Fiscal Responsibility Commission. The Justice Initiative, together with the Right to Know Initiative and the Gulf of Guinea Citizens Network, is currently focusing on securing public disclosure of a public works project on the dredging of the River Niger in the Niger Delta region. The Justice Initiative is also working to support state-level freedom of information adoption processes in six of the 36 states in Nigeria—Edo, Kano, Kebbi, Lagos, Niger, and Rivers.

Design of Pretrial Detention Project Underway in Nigeria
Lagos State accounts for almost 41 percent of Nigeria's pretrial detention population. In July 2009, the Lagos state government invited the Justice Initiative to advise and assist it in the design of a system for managing this problem. The Justice Initiative is working with the office of the State Attorney-General on the design of a pretrial detention management system for the state, the final version of which could be ready for implementation before the end of 2009.

Challenges Facing International Justice in Darfur
In July, together with the International Center for Transitional Justice, the Justice Initiative prepared a written submission for, and met with the members of, the African Union High Level Panel on Darfur. Subsequently, the Justice Initiative has met with African Union officials to discuss ratification of the protocol of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights and the potential expansion of the African Court's jurisdiction to include individual criminal responsibility.

Publications Examining the Role of Citizenship and Statelessness in Africa
The Justice Initiative and the Africa Governance, Monitoring, and Advocacy Project of the Open Society Institute in October launched two publications that document citizenship-linked discrimination in Africa. Struggles for Citizenship in Africa surveys the use and abuse of citizenship on the continent. It analyzes the development of citizenship legislation and phenomena such as mass expulsions, manipulation of nationality legislation for political purposes, and the link between civil conflict and citizenship. Citizenship Law in Africa: A Comparative Study provides a more detailed account of the development of citizenship laws, and in particular how such laws are used to include and exclude various groups on discriminatory grounds.

CharlesTaylorTrial.org Continues Monitoring from The Hague
In July, the Justice Initiative revamped its trial monitoring website in preparation for the opening of Charles Taylor's defense at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. The former Liberian President, facing 11 charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law, took the stand and testified on direct examination for more than two months. The revamped site has journalistic daily features that focus on the key legal issues: AllAfrica.com and newspapers in Sierra Leone and Liberia have reprinted the blog postings. The site has generated more than 3,000 comments in less than two months.

Corruption Cases Against Equatorial Guinea Move Forward
In May, a criminal complaint filed by the Justice Initiative together with Spanish partners, APDHE v. Obiang Family, was transferred to an investigating judge in Canary Islands and formally admitted in the first instance court in Las Palmas. The case involves allegations that family members and close associates of the president of Equatorial Guinea diverted large sums of money from oil revenues to purchase real estate in Spain. A similar case before the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, APDHE v. Equatorial Guinea, asserting that the government's self-enrichment is a violation of the peoples' right-consecrated in Article 21 of the African Charter-to develop the nation's resources, is scheduled for review of admissibility at the commission's November session. In July, the Justice Initiative issued Corruption and Its Consequences In Equatorial Guinea, a briefing paper on corruption in the country.

ASIA

Concerns about Corruption Plague Khmer Rouge Tribunal
The Justice Initiative continued its monitoring and advocacy in relation to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia as the tribunal pushed forward with its first trial-the prosecution of Kaing Guek Eav (a.k.a. Duch), who ran the infamous Toul Sleng torture center in Phnom Penh during Khmer Rouge rule. In August 2009, the United States brokered a deal between the United Nations and the Cambodian government that contained limited anticorruption measures and allowed funds for the court to be released by donors and the United Nations Development Programme. The Justice Initiative issued a report noting that the measures fail to address previous corruption allegations, contain no public reporting requirement, and make no provisions for investigative capacity if issues are not resolved through "consultations." 

Legal Clinics Expanded in Indonesia, China, and Afghanistan
In May, the Community Education Clinic at the Pasundan University in Indonesia was integrated into the law school curriculum. Both Pasundan and the International Islamic University clinics are now serving as examples for other universities in the country hoping to replicate the program. In July, the Justice Initiative doubled its network of criminal defense clinics in China to include eight new universities: Wuhan, Jilin, Nanjing, Northeast (in Beijing), China University, Fundan, CASS, and Lanzhou. And in Afghanistan, a Justice Initiative clinic at Herat University completed its first academic year and the Education Department of Herat Province has requested to expand the clinic's street law program to 20 high schools. 

EUROPE

European Court of Human Rights Upholds Freedom of Expression Protections for Journalists
On October 8, the European Court of Human Rights delivered an important judgment in a case, Romanenko v. Russia, involving libel lawsuits against the media brought by government officials and agencies. The Justice Initiative and the Moscow Media Law and Policy Institute had earlier filed a third party brief on the case. In 2002, a newspaper in Vladivostok published an article about illegal logging, quoting the concerns of local officials who said that federal agencies were contributing to the problem. One federal agency and its director sued the newspaper for defamation and won damages. The European Court of Human Right found a violation of freedom of expression where a newspaper was ordered to pay libel damages for quoting local officials and had acted in good faith. In a decision which discussed the Justice Initiative's brief extensively, the court reiterated its longstanding position that criticism of government conduct deserves the highest degree of protection in a democratic society.

Human Rights Committee Rules on Ethnic Profiling in Spain
In July, in a case filed by the Justice Initiative and Women's Link Worldwide, the United Nations Human Rights Committee became the first international tribunal to declare that police identity checks motivated by race or ethnicity violate the international human right to non-discrimination. The case, Rosalind Williams v. Spain, began 17 years ago, when Williams, a naturalized Spanish citizen, was stopped by a National Police officer in the rail station in Valladolid, Spain. Of all the people on the train platform, she was the only one to be stopped and asked for her identity documents. She was also the only black person on the platform. Williams soon launched a legal challenge to the identity check, claiming she was targeted because of her race. The implications of the UN Human Rights Committee's judgment extend far beyond Spain, where ethnicity-based police stops are still a common practice, to wider Europe, where monitoring shows a persistent and damaging pattern of ethnic profiling of minorities and immigrants in police stops and searches without explanation and without clear or effective purpose.

Report finds Discriminatory Police Practices in Paris
Following 18 months of preparation, documentation, and analysis, the Justice Initiative published a report Profiling Minorities: A Study of Stop-and-Search Practices in Paris in June 2009. The report, a joint effort with the Paris-based Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, found that police officers in Paris consistently stop people on the basis of ethnicity and dress rather than on the basis of suspicious individual behavior, which confirmed decades of anecdotal reports but marked the first time that ethnic profiling by French police was statistically proven. The report documented over 500 police stops over a one-year period and across five locations and found that Blacks and Arabs are six times more likely to be stopped than whites. The report recommends a number of reforms of identity check practices in Paris, including reform of law and policies that allow ethnic profiling, an explicit ban on discrimination by police officials, stronger criteria for the "reasonable suspicion" required to stop persons, and improved record keeping and review of stops to assess their impact and promote better practice. 

Lithuanian Case Pits Freedom of Expression against Right to a Reputation
In June, the Justice Initiative, joined by the Media Legal Defense Initiative and the Romanian Helsinki Committee, filed a third-party brief with the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Pauliukas v. Lithuania, arguing that Article 8 (protecting rights to privacy and personal integrity) of the European Convention on Human Rights should be interpreted to grant protection from defamation only in exceptional cases and with due regard for the court's free speech case law under Article 10. The question of how to balance privacy and free speech rights has produced conflicting judgments by various sections of the court.

Promoting Legal Aid Reform in Turkey
In June, a Justice Initiative submission to the 2009 European Commission report on Turkey's progress on EU accession noted that, although Turkish legislation grants free legal aid to everyone, in practice fewer than 2.5 percent of criminal defendants were provided with legal aid in 2007-2009, while at least 40 percent would have qualified for such counsel under the European Convention on Human Rights criteria. The commission's Turkey 2009 Progress Report issued on October 14 concluded, "Overall, effective legal assistance is limited and a number of criminal defendants remain unrepresented. Defendants' awareness of the availability of free legal assistance needs to be raised."

Promoting Effective Criminal Defence in the European Union
In July, the Justice Initiative issued, jointly with Amnesty International and other nongovernmental organizations, a statement calling on the European Council to strengthen a draft resolution concerning the procedural rights of defendants in the European Union, with a particular focus on early access to legal counsel. Subsequently, the resolution draft was revised to underscore that the right to legal advice in criminal proceedings should be provided from "the earliest possible stage of such proceedings." The resolution will be considered by the council later this year.

LATIN AMERICA

Mexican Law Students Help Secure the Release of 20 People Wrongfully Convicted
In August, due to the work of Mexican law students at a clinic established by the Justice Initiative, the Mexican Supreme Court ordered the release of 20 people who were convicted in a massacre of 45 people in 1997. The court ruled that authorities obtained evidence illegally and that the defendants were denied due process and lacked an adequate defense. The case is especially significant, as it touches upon core due process issues rarely dealt with in constitutional litigation in Mexico.

Pretrial Detention in Mexico
In August, the Justice Initiative's advocacy efforts resulted in legislation allowing the operation of a pretrial services agency in the juvenile justice system in the Mexican state of Morelos. The agency will evaluate the pretrial risk posed by individual defendants using objective criteria, and manage the provision of bail supervision services. The Justice Initiative—in collaboration with local partners—will play a lead role in setting up the agency and measuring its impact.