International Human Rights Law Clinic
In an era of rapid change caused by rising global interdependence, the International Human Rights Law Clinic (IHRLC) at the UC Berkeley School of Law pursues a dual mission: promoting justice at home and abroad and training attorneys for a changing profession. IHRLC marshals the resources of the faculty and students of UC Berkeley to advance the struggle for human rights on behalf of individuals and marginalized communities. It clarifies complex issues, develops innovative policy solutions, and engages in vigorous advocacy. At the same time, IHRLC prepares graduates for an increasingly diverse, competitive, and international legal profession. One of the leading human rights clinics in the country, IHRLC takes advantage of its home in California, the largest and most diverse state in the nation, and builds on Berkeley Law’s commitment to international engagement. Since 1998, IHRLC has completed dozens of projectsand trained over 200 students
Law Clinic Plays Leading Role in Guatemalan Human Rights Case
Legal Team: Top row (left to right): Silvia Barreno (Fundacion Myrna Mack), Luz Gonzalez '13, Holly Hutchings Dranginis '13, Roxanna Altholz '99, Sonia Fleury '13 Bottow Row (left to right): Monica Leonardo (FMM), Carmen Atkins '08, Carolina Solano '12, Helen Mack (FMM).
By Nancy Bronstein
A much-anticipated public hearing in Quayaquil, Ecuador last week, presented new, irrefutable evidence of Guatemala’s state-sanctioned policy of forced disappearances over the course of its 36-year armed conflict. Students of Berkeley Law’s International Human Rights Law Clinic played a critical role in the legal case that revealed the human rights abuses aired at the hearing.
During Guatemala’s civil war, an estimated 45,000 people were “disappeared,” most of them civilians, in what’s been called the most bloody and continuous wave of repression and violence in Latin America.
Seven judges of the prestigious Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an arm of the Organization of American States, presided before a packed audience that sometimes erupted in gasps or sobs. During the eight-hour hearing, the plaintiffs’ evidence was meticulously laid out in what’s known as “The Diario Militar Case,” named for a passport-sized logbook made public in 1999.
This 54-page journal was smuggled out of Guatemala for safe keeping and delivered to an analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington D.C. Its pages are filled with small black and white identification photos, names, descriptions, and most eerily, coded entries for the executions of 183 people targeted by the military between 1983 and 1985—years that coincided with the war’s most violent decade.
The logbook offered the first tangible and authenticated evidence that a state policy of repression and terror had been securely in place in Guatemala for quite some time. Its discovery made real the possibility that, some day, justice might be brought to the victims’ families.
Of the tens of thousands who disappeared in Guatemala, this documented group became the focus of Assistant Clinical Professor Roxanna Altholz, associate director of the International Human Rights Law clinic. After the logbook was published, victims’ families approached the Fundacion Myrna Mack (FMM) for legal aid. The FMM is a distinguished and widely respected Guatemalan human rights organization named for a young anthropologist murdered in 1990. Foundation Director Helen Mack, Myrna’s sister, asked Altholz to be lead counsel on the case. That was seven years ago.
Since then, Altholz and more than two dozen clinic students, in partnership with the FMM, have advocated for, and represented, 28 of the victims via 129 of their family members.
A tidal wave of injustice
Family members hold pictures of their disappeared loved ones.
The years of work came to fruition when Altholz, four current clinic students—Carolina Solano LL.M. ’12, Holly Hutchings Dranginis ’13, Luz Gonzalez Fernandez ’13, and Sonia Fleury ’13—as well as former clinic student Carmen Atkins ’08, and Helen Mack, traveled to Quayaquil to present their case.
In anticipation of the hearing, dozens of the victims’ family members worked with the Berkeley and Guatemalan teams preparing written testimony to enter into the court record. Of those, only two family members were asked by the Court to testify in Ecuador.
“The two victim witnesses represented their own families, but also the many families who couldn’t come to the hearing. This was their first opportunity to air their claims publicly before an impartial tribunal. They’d been waiting almost 30 years for this moment,” said Altholz.
As a clinical professor, Altholz teaches students about the practice of law through litigation. “The students are instructed on a range of legal skills in the context of a case of enormous historical importance,” she said.
Working in twos to ensure there was always another set of eyes to verify and double check their work, the students were tasked with prepping experts and witnesses for testimony, drafting cross examination questions and declarations for victim witnesses, analyzing reparations options, reviewing case law and researching the tactics of Guatemala's security forces. But more than anything, they worked to gain the trust and confidence of the families.
"You could work your whole life before you’d have the privilege to be part of a project like this," says Luz Gonzalez Fernandez. "For what I’m after in my career—this is it!"
Family member witness Wendy Santizo testifies about her mother'sdisappearance and her own torture and rape at the age of nine
In addition to the family members, the Court heard testimony from the Guatemalan prosecutor in charge of the criminal investigation into the disappearances, and just one expert witness, Kate Doyle, director of the Guatemala Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. It was Doyle who published the notorious logbook. For years, Guatemalan authorities had claimed that no such documentation existed.
Holly Hutchings Dranginis worked closely with Doyle for months to prep and help craft her testimony, while Carmen Atkins questioned her at the hearing. The Court congratulated Doyle on her exceptionally clear and thorough testimony.
“There’s still a lot of silence and fear around the war,” said Sonia Fleury, who, along with Dranginis, analyzed the state’s criminal investigation files. “The state’s files were a sham. This case could start moving other cases and dialogues forward in Guatemala. This is the first time that the families were able to publicly address the state on a level playing field.”
The Court is not expected to issue its binding ruling before September. When it does, it will no doubt draw worldwide attention, particularly from other Latin American countries where similar events have taken place.
“This case will reinforce the state’s duty to provide access to police, military, and other official archives,” said Altholz. “Those official documents contain the evidence necessary to hold Guatemalan authorities, many of whom have positions in the government today, accountable for their crimes.”
Some reparations will also be mandated. The families have asked for an apology from the president, a truthful account in school textbooks of this sordid chapter in their country’s history, and a museum dedicated to the victims along with economic reparations. But of paramount importance to them is that the remains of their loved ones be returned and that those responsible for these crimes be held accountable and brought to justice.
Berkeley Students, Carolina Solano '12 and Holly Hutchings Dranginis '13, family member witnesses, Efrian Garcia and Wendy Santizo, and FMM staff member, Silvia Barreno listen to expert testimony.
In 2005, in another extraordinary discovery, investigators came upon an estimated 80 million pages of rotting documents secreted away by the Guatemalan National Police decades ago. It was one of the largest archives found in the history of Latin America. For future criminal cases, these documents will be invaluable. But the state is still hiding its vast military archives, all part of what Altholz has called “a tidal wave of injustice.” The families have asked the Court to order the state to turn over these documents.
“A statement by this Court that the state of Guatemala disappeared these people will give the families validation nationally and internationally, and that will have immeasurable value for people who have been denied the truth for so long,” said Carolina Solano. “The importance of this hearing is public recognition of the disappeared as victims.”
Dominico-Haitian Activist Sonia Pierre Dies at Age 48
New Report Urges Reparations for Victims of Khmer Rouge Regime
By Andrew Cohen 
A timely report co-released by the International Human Rights Clinic (IHRLC) urges Cambodia’s UN-backed tribunal to comply with international criminal justice practice and grant reparations to victims of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.
The second trial of Khmer Rouge senior leaders for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—which claimed an estimated two million lives from 1975 to 1979—began last week before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). More than three decades after the killing fields, and with the three accused leaders in declining health, victims who have joined the criminal proceedings as civil parties are increasingly concerned that justice may not be served.
The ECCC is a new hybrid court with both Cambodian and international judges. It’s the target of the new report by Berkeley Law students Saira Hussain ’13, Shayla Johnson ’13, and Peggy Li ’13 called “Victims’ Right to Remedy: Awarding Meaningful Reparations at the ECCC.” The report is co-authored by the NGOs Access to Justice Asia and the Center for Justice & Accountability.
“Victims demand and deserve the acknowledgment and dignity that reparations measures can provide,” said IHRLC Director Laurel E. Fletcher. “The court should establish a generous framework for these victims to state what redress means to them. It’s time for the court to empower victims.”
“Victims’ Right to Remedy” calls on the court to adjust the legal interpretations that led to its rejection of nearly all reparations requests in the first Khmer Rouge trial. It recommends that reparations be examined at the start of the current trial and not treated as an afterthought. More information about the report, in a recent op-ed co-written by Fletcher, is available here.
Hussain, Johnson, and Li worked with Fletcher and lawyers in Cambodia, California, and Singapore. Their research calls attention to a lack of clarity regarding reparations standards at the court, which the report finds “impinges on the rights of civil parties and creates uncertainty in Cambodian and international law.”
“It’s unfathomable that 32 years later this is the start of people getting justice, yet most media coverage of the court doesn’t mention reparations,” Li said. “It’s shocking what hoops these victims must go through just to seek reparations, and more people need to know about it.”
A Call for Justice
This could be the last trial of the Khmer Rouge leaders, largely because of their age and health. Consequently, it may represent the only chance victims have to claim redress against any perpetrators.
Nevertheless, the court has been reluctant to exercise its powers and provide meaningful reparations to the nearly 4,000 civil parties participating in the trial. In its previous case, the court cited legal barriers and procedural hurdles that other international courts have circumvented easily.
“The ECCC is applying a narrow standard that has denied legitimate requests that other courts have recognized,” Johnson said. “We’re trying to push the court toward compliance with international standards and show that it has ample authority to grant non-monetary remedies to victims.”
Some of those potential remedies include building museums and monuments to commemorate the victims, providing educational support for children of survivors, and offering mental health services. The ECCC can also award specific redress for elderly, vulnerable, and low-income victims and order medical care for survivors who suffered harm as a result of the genocide.
Reparations constitute a new and emerging area in international human rights law. Only courts in Latin America and Europe have dealt with and resolved reparations issues effectively; the ECCC is the first Asian court to confront them.
Therefore, the report recommends convening a group of experts to create a mechanism for handling reparations. This independent body would receive and administer donor funds to implement a transparent, accountable reparations system.
“Our report explains the reasoning behind reparations and why they’re so important for Khmer Rouge victims and the future of international law,” Hussain said. “The ECCC has an ideal opportunity to make its mark and be an example for both Asian and hybrid international courts that face similar challenges. What better time than this?”
12/7/2011
Press Stories
KR Victims Face Rocky Road to Reparations, Phnom Penh Post, 11/18/11
Opinion: More to Justice Than a Trial, Phnom Penh Post, 12/06/11