After Marlon vigorously searched through IBJ’s resumes, we found a French criminal defender who was interested in IBJ’s work. We called him and within a week we were meeting our trainer. Mehdi Benbouzid, a French criminal defender with extensive experience training lawyers, students and police, has an invested interest in Africa and a commitment to human rights. He also had the necessary amount of francophone civil law expertise, as he had a Law degree and a Masters in Law from Université Jean Moulin in Lyon. He had been actively practicing as a criminal defender for twelve years, all the while teaching and lecturing on criminal law. He had lectured on war crimes and crimes against human rights. He had recently completed work with the International Red Cross in Syria and Jordan as a field coordinator/team leader, interviewing suspected terrorists held in Jordan and providing human rights assessments in Syria. He was perfect.

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IBJ began planning the Burundi training program in earnest in February of 2008. It was my responsibility to adapt our work in China and Vietnam to this training. I was being assisted by a young Zimbabwean attorney, Marlon Zakeyo. Marlon had worked as an intern for IBJ for two years, during which time he had been building relationships with legal organizations in Africa.

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I arrived at International Bridges to Justice in November of 2007 to fill the role of Deputy Director. Prior to working at IBJ, I was a public defender in San Francisco for twenty-two years. I had met the founder of IBJ, Karen Tse, in 1992 when we were colleagues in the SFPD office. After gaining experience as a defender, Karen moved on to a career as an international human rights attorney. She founded IBJ in 2001.When I began working at IBJ, the organization had already developed an expertise in training attorneys and developing systemic solutions to implementing criminal laws in Asia. Preparatory work had already been completed to expand IBJ’s programs into Burundi and Rwanda, and one of my first assignments was to organize the first training of defenders, judges, police, prosecutors and members of civil society in Burundi. Contemporaneously, IBJ had plans to follow up work in Rwanda by launching a rights awareness campaign in that country.

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The following article was originally published in the December 2008 issue of the Montana Lawyer magazine:

In January of this year I had the good fortune to travel to Geneva, Switzerland on behalf of the Mansfield Center at The University of Montana to meet with Karen Tse, the CEO and founder of International Bridges to Justice (IBJ). Karen is a graduate of UCLA Law School and Harvard Divinity School, a former public defender, and the 2008 recipient of the ABA’s International Human Rights Award. We reached an agreement with IBJ to assist in developing criminal defense clinics in law schools in China. Clinical legal education is still new to China, and criminal defense clinics are even newer. Our current project has 8 participating Chinese law schools, and we will expand the project to 16 schools by the middle of next year. The project is being conducted in conjunction with the Chinese Committee on Clinical Legal Education, the umbrella organization for clinical education in China. Over the next few months, I will describe some of the problems and challenges to legal reform in China, and to the best of my ability give you my perspective on what it’s like for a practitioner from Montana to be participating in that reform.

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Attorney Mu Hongying gave up a successful private practice in 2002 to dedicate herself fully to helping those who need her most: the poor and rural residents of her county. One of the few brave lawyers pioneering a model indigent defense practice for indigent defense, Attorney Mu is undaunted by the challenge of reforming a criminal justice system that — despite having a solid legal framework on paper — in practice grants defendants few rights.

During one of the interactive sessions, Attorney Mu inspired the assembled training participants with her recent zealous defense of a 15 year old boy. Impoverished, the boy’s family was unable send him to school. To pass the time, the boy began aimlessly playing games at internet cafés. One day, the boy had no money to play and impulsively took a cell phone belonging to another teenager in the café. Subsequently, he was caught running out of the café and detained for many months until trial. During his entire incarceration, his parents never once visited him, leaving the boy feeling depressed and hopeless.

Deeply committed, Attorney Mu visited the boy at the detention center many times. Through this, she learned much about the boy’s life, including how remorseful he was for his conduct. Thereafter, Attorney Mu met with the boy’s parents and persuaded them to talk with their son and provide better support. Because of Attorney Mu’s efforts, the parents began visiting the boy. Ultima-tely, Attorney Mu convinced the court that a non-jail sentence was a just outcome, since the boy now had proper parental support. Attorney Mu’s perse-verance is a prime example of why zealous defense work is so critical. Without her help, the boy likely would have received a long jail sentence.

This September, I took a leave from my job as an assistant state public defender in the Office of the Minnesota State Public Defender to volunteer with IBJ in China. A juvenile defense lawyer with over 24 years practice experience in the US, I was particularly interested in assisting IBJ’s Juvenile Justice Project, a program that aims to improve the quality of indigent defense for children in criminal proceedings, while also promot-ing improved implementation of laws designed to protect the rights of accused juveniles. Through a partnership with the International Senior Lawyers Project (ISLP) in the United States, I learned about this exciting opportunity at IBJ. ISLP began as a small group of retired lawyers from private firms who wanted to find opportunities to use their legal skills as volunteers. The organization continues to grow and now has volunteers in various countries around the world. ISLP agreed to sponsor my trip and helped make the arrangements for me to live in Beijing and volunteer with IBJ over the next three months.

Over the past month, I have learned a great deal about the needs of China’s juvenile justice system. Although by law juveniles are entitled to legal aid, many go through the criminal process without ever seeing a lawyer. Those who do receive appointment of counsel frequently receive substandard legal representation. Often, defense lawyers are appointed to juvenile cases just a few days before trial, preventing them from visiting their clients, asserting their legal rights or presenting any meaningful defense at trial. As a result, the vast majority of juvenile suspects are detained for many months before trial; almost all are convicted and frequently receive jail sentences, even for petty crimes.

Many of the Chinese lawyers I have met are dedicated passionately to the reform of the juvenile justice system, yet lack the skills necessary to bring about meaningful change. I have learned of the need for China’s lawyers to gain practical trial skills and how great a need there is for the international community to help provide that training. China’s juvenile defenders are interested in working on skills such as how to interview juvenile clients, learning about adolescent development and achieving alternatives to incarceration for their juvenile clients. Over the next three months, I am working with IBJ and their Chinese partners to develop a comprehensive juvenile defense manual, a practical guide that will instruct lawyers on best practices for defending accused juveniles.

International Bridges to Justice Intern and Law Student Sarah Brundage interviews a judge from Kampong Province about the challenges facing the judicial system and why many defendants don’t have a lawyer and why the accused can sit in prison for months and even years without a trial.

International Bridges to Justice Founder and CEO Karen Tse speaks at the 2008 Committee of 100 Conference.

The Committee of 100 is a national non-partisan organization composed of American citizens of Chinese descent. Each member has achieved positions of leadership in the United States in a broad range of professions. With these diverse backgrounds, members collectively pool their strengths and experience to address important issues concerning the Chinese-American community, as well as issues affecting U.S.-China relations.

As part of her effort to engage the global criminal justice community, IBJ Founder and CEO Karen Tse participated last month in New York University’s Reynolds Speaker Series. According to NYU, the series:

…presents prominent social entrepreneurs and leaders from across the spectrum of public and professional sectors who will share their insights as cutting-edge, far reaching change makers.

As always, Karen captivated the audience with her own background as a criminal defender and her insights into human rights in the 21st century. But what was particularly interesting and inspiring to me was the intensity and passion with which the audience responded to her comments.

At the end of the day, IBJ can scream its head off about the need to implement criminal justice legislation… but progress will only come when we can inspire the next generation of defenders and social entrepreneurs to invest their time, passion and resources in the transformation of their local legal infrastructure.

If the diverse and highly talented audience at NYU was an indication of that coalition, it seems we’re well on our way…

Karen’s full remarks can be seen here. (Unfortunately, you must have Real Player to watch the clip.) They can also be heard via podcast here.

Among the social entrepreneurs featured alongside Karen in the series, were Jed Emerson, Jacqueline Novogratz, and Dr. Paul Farmer. Many thanks to NYU and the Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship for putting together such a fantastic series.

As an intern at IBJ, I was lucky enough to be able to accompany the IBJ staff to the Commemoration of the Rwandan Genocide on April 7^th, 2008 at the United Nations in Geneva. The program consisted of speeches by the UN Secretary General and the Rwandan Ambassador Sebudandi, an account by a Rwandan Tutsi who lived abroad in refuge during the genocide, and a poem by a victim of the genocide. The whole tribute, which lasted an hour, addressed the tragedies and devastating crimes against humanity that occurred in Rwanda in 1994.

Sitting in that conference room and listening to the stories from survivors of the genocide, I could not help but wonder why the international community failed to intervene? The tragedy of the Rwandan genocide plagues our generation still. It is the responsibility of civil society and the international community to ensure that the crimes against the Tutsi people will never be repeated to them and all other ethnic, religious, national, or racial groups. The maintenance of such basic human rights should be an essential concern to all states, NGOs, IOs, and individuals.

Hence, I highly value my opportunity to intern at IBJ as a chance to exercise my abilities to ameliorate human rights situations. However, one does not need to work or volunteer at a human rights NGO in order to make a difference. We all, as individuals, should make it a priority to educate ourselves on the situation of all people in all parts of the world. Human rights respect is not a privilege, it is a birthright, and it is our duty to guarantee that all crimes against humanity are prevented.