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TPIC Honorary Fellow Reed Brody makes cases against dictators around the world

March 02, 2015

Reed Brody, the Honorary Fellow-in-Residence for this year’s Public Interest Week, discussed working high profile cases against dictators such as Augusto Pinochet, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, and Hissène Habré.

By Kathy Zhang C’17

On February 26, the Toll Public Interest Center hosted a dinner and lecture by the Honorary Fellow-in-Residence as part of their annual week-long celebration of public interest. This year marks TPIC’s 25th Anniversary, and the evening’s speaker, Reed Brody, delivered a lecture titled “The Quest for Justice, an International Litigator’s Perspective from Augusto Pinochet to Hissène Habré…to George Bush?”

As Counsel and Spokesperson for Human Rights Watch, Brody is deeply involved in international litigation regarding “crimes against humanity.” He has worked in various high-profile cases, including those of Hissène Habré, Augusto Pinochet, and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. In addition, he has authored four Human Rights Watch reports on U.S. treatment of prisoners in the “war on terror,” and his work has been featured in various prominent news outlets.

Brody began his lecture with an overview of international justice and its developments since the mid-twentieth century. “Unfortunately when you look back on [the twentieth century], it was bookended by genocides,” he said. “The Nuremberg trials after World War II held out this promise of “never again,” that the worst perpetrators of atrocities would be brought to justice, and that really didn’t pan out for the longest time.”

According to Brody, the Cold War had led to a “collective failure to build on the precedent of Nuremberg,” and it wasn’t until after the genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda that the International Criminal Court was established and that international human rights were brought back in the picture.

Brody then moved on to discuss his experiences working in the Pinochet case. “I was at a retreat at Human Rights Watch when somebody came in and said, ‘Augusto Pinochet has been arrested in London!’” recounted Brody. “This was big. This was everything we’ve been thinking about since Nuremberg, and we had to do something about it.”

While Pinochet was never convicted for any of his crimes, his indictment and arrest on an international warrant set precedents for the principle of universal jurisdiction, which Brody describes as “the international law answer to the spectacle of tyrants and torturers who cover themselves with immunity at home.”

Speaking on the case’s legal successes, Brody remarked that “this wasn’t a wake-up call for dictators so much as it was an inspiration for human rights activists.” He added, “There was this moment of real effervescence [following the Pinochet case].”

Brody spent the rest of his lecture focusing on his work as lead counsel in the case against Chad’s exiled former dictator Hissène Habré. “Habré, who was alleged to have committed 40,000 killings [in Chad], was living in Senegal, and that made the case very interesting to us,” said Brody. For Brody, it was another golden opportunity for the principles of universal jurisdiction to overcome the shelter that diplomatic immunity offered past and present dictators.

After wrapping up his recount of his work with the Habré case, he ended his lecture noting that the trial date for Hissène Habré is set for May 2015.

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