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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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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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.