Many lawyers find inspiration from a mentor or a legal text, others find it elsewhere. I am one of the latter types.
It’s not that I haven’t worked with, or known, some remarkable and inspiring lawyers. For close to two decades, I had the privilege of working with my friend Ramsey Clark — the 66th Attorney General of the United States. He served his country for more than two-decades in the Department of Justice before being named the nation’s top lawyer. Having run for both President and Senator from New York, he made two unsuccessful, but honourable, efforts to seek public office. But he is most well-known for his accomplishments later in life. These include standing against United States aggression around the world, representing the most downtrodden and the most villainized, taking on cases with no hope of compensation for his work, as well as speaking truth to power when others feared to do so.
Perhaps our most stressful experience working together was when we represented Iraqi President Saddam Hussein before the Iraqi Special Tribunal. On two occasions, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that the procedure violated almost every provision of the right to a fair trial or due process that is known to international human rights law.[1] Four of our colleagues were murdered. In one case, we were delivered live videos — suspiciously sent to our foreign and Iraqi mobile phones despite the fact that our numbers were only known by our American minders — of our colleague Dawood being beaten and then executed as his captors paraded him around Baghdad with impunity. They drove past US armoured vehicles manned with the soldiers who had said that they would protect us. The lawyers were frequently threatened and coerced by the people who were allegedly protecting us and who were supposed to ensure the trial was fair.[2] When we tried to advocate for our client in the courtroom, the curtains to the public gallery were conveniently closed and we were threatened by the judicial authorities and court staff. When Ramsey, who was in his late seventies, tried to draw the fair trial violations to the Court’s attention, he was shut down by Court staff who hit him and took him out of the courtroom with the approval of the judge. And, of course, after an unfair trial, our client was extrajudicially executed.
Ramsey’s courage and commitment were unyielding. When he was around eighty years old, he waited twelve hours in the desert sun of Rafah to be allowed into Gaza by Egyptian officials. Here he met with Ismail Hanyeh, who was later elected Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority in a fair and free election. Because the West disagreed with the Palestinian peoples’ choice of leadership, Hanyeh was not allowed to function as the elected leader of the Palestinian people. Ramsey’s perseverance, commitment to justice, and rule of law is a remarkable lesson for any lawyer committed to the rule of law — that is, the equal application of law to all.
Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, I only met late in his life, after he had been a leader of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and then the country’s Foreign Minister. In 2008, he was elected, by the Member States, to the post that holds the highest-ranking person in the United Nations. Although he was a Marianist priest by training, when he became President of the UN General Assembly, he tried to move the United Nations in the direction of justice and grappled with the legal means of doing so. For example, he resumed the Emergency Session of the General Assembly to help end the December 2008 eruption of violence in Gaza. He also tried to expose the hypocrisy of R2P, or the responsibility to protect as it was being envisioned by the Western Group and Other groupings of States in the UN, by holding a meeting on this contested principle at which Noam Chomsky and Richard Falk explained its fallacies. By convening a conference on financing for development, he tried to reverse the more than 60 years of UN policy that left the Global South further behind in economic development than before the creation of the UN. He also tried to give civil society more access to the UN, especially during the high-level segment of the General Assembly, despite the elitist obstinance of the Secretary-General. Father Miguel, as he was called to his friends, spent his entire life fighting for social justice. He was motivated by liberation theology in his priestly vocation, and by the rule of law in his political activities. The latter is best illustrated by his initiation, in Nicaragua’s case against the US at the International Court of Justice, which challenged the legality of the US military intervention in his country through support to the contras. Father Miguel’s commitment to international justice is memorialized in the last book he wrote wherein he calls for re-creating the United Nations.[3] In the little time I had with Miguel, he became a close friend. His unwavering dedication to the struggle for equity, social justice, Mother Earth, and the rule of international law as a means of achieving justice provided lessons that will not be forgotten.
As a representative and later board member of the non-governmental organization Nord-Sud XXI, I met two of the most incredible and successful freedom fighters in the modern world. The first, who was honorary President of the NGO until he was elected president of his country, was Nelson Mandela — his wisdom and skill in both law and politics is legendary. In our few brief meetings and in his life, he reminded me that the commitment to achieving justice requires sacrifices and putting oneself second to the good of the whole. He was an embodiment of the African principle of Ubuntu. The president of the Nord-Sud XXI from 1994 to his death in 2012, was the first President of Algeria, Ahmed Ben Bella. He had a short tenure as the first President of Algeria after he had been a leader in the revolution to drive the French occupiers out of his country. He was overthrown by a military coup d’etat in 1965 after less than three years in office because he stood for his principles of justice and the rule of law against a foreign-backed military regime. His commitment continued after he left office through the NGO he founded — his dedication is also apparent in the NGOs well-documented representations in various bodies of the United Nations. Ben Bella became a friend, but also a beacon of liberty and freedom. Both he and Mandela commanded a presence, even in intimate conversation, as individuals who so fully understood what justice means. This was undoubtedly due to their own sacrifices to achieve justice for their people.
These were all individuals who have gained worldwide renown and recognition and, perhaps, it is perceivable that they would most definitely inspire. However, there have been others who were reviled, but, who, if you knew or spoke with them, portrayed a most raw sense of justice and, perhaps, even greater commitment.
For example, there is the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, who — despite the condemnation of his past — refused to betray his people and seek his own liberty when it was offered to him by the Americans. Or Osama Bin Laden, who readily accepted responsibility for horrific acts of violence in the United States, despite it being physically and technologically impossible for him to be the orchestrator. He, in private conversation, could articulate the oppression that unrestrained capitalism had caused among his people in the Arab world. Or Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who had, not only the foresight to see the need for a unified Africa, but devoted his resources to accomplishing it. This came despite him knowing how it would threaten the vested interests of parties who were exploiting Africa’s human and natural resources for their own substantial gain. Or Ismail Hanyeh, who, while playing football with both senior colleagues and the shabuh of Palestine, could, during a water break, explain the imperative of freeing his people from oppression and ongoing genocide.
These individuals took their stand for justice in ways that many of us will reject, but with a degree of integrity and awareness that, both figuratively and literally, put their lives on the line.
Similarly, there were books that many have read for inspiration and others that many may condemn that, for me, taught the fundamentals of the struggle for justice. This instilled in me the need to question standard narratives.
Henry David Thoreau’s essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience or Civil Disobedience causes one to question authority and follow their own conscience. Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken made a difference by promoting the necessity of courage. In their works, Mahmud Darwish[4] and May Angelou[5] describe struggles for identity against repression.
Some are works of people I have known. Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, Muammar Qaddafi’s Green Book, Osama Bin Laden’s untitled essay on the exploitation of Arab oil, Ramsey Clark’s The Fire This Time, and Edward Said’s Orientalism are just a few such works that, unusual and as criticized as they may be, encouraged me to look critically at the standard narrative.
There were, of course, also law books. As a young student trying to understand the practice of law, I read Mahatma Gandhi’s The Law and Lawyers — a piece which readies one for both success and failure in the law. For jurisprudence I read Ronald Dworkin’s Taking Rights Seriously (1977) — this was a refreshing accompaniment to the required reading of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971) and H.LA. Hart’s The Concept of Law (1961) and Law, Liberty, and Morality (1963). For American constitutional law, a subject that intrigued me to the utmost and which was essential to developing a sense of justice, I read all three volumes of Max Farrand’s The Records of the Federal Convention (1911) and all three hundred pages of his The Framing of the Constitution of the United States (1913). But I also read Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), Stanford Levinson’s Constitutional Faith (1989), and perhaps received the most significant impression on my understanding of the American Constitution from Merrill Jensen’s challenging Making of the American Constitution (1964). These books, as law students know, must be among the many that they must read to gain a sufficient understanding of any subject of law. The above are offered as some, of the now very old, influences that developed my ability to question authority and defend fundamental rights. But, while constitutional law was my first love, international law was my lasting love.
It was necessary to exceed my enthusiasm of constitutional law to understand international law. It was in a frenzy of board reading, dipping into anything that looked like it was about international law, that I came across the writings of Myres McDougal, known to his students and colleagues as Mac. I read almost everything that Mac wrote or to which he contributed.[6] I was fascinated by the collaborations between him as a lawyer and Harold Lasswell as a sociologist. I felt that they understood the law as the organic process it was. I didn’t often agree with him, but he had an academic rigour that should be a lesson in research methodology for any student of social science.
While Mac’s writings were a source of methodological rigour, inspiration often came from critical studies movements such as the so-called Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), the feminist approach to international law, and the proponents of critical legal studies.
Richard Falk’s McDougal-like understanding of these approaches, which arrived at very different outcomes than Mac,[7] encouraged my exploration of these movements. There were the ‘classical’ TWAIL scholars like Mohammed Bejdaoui[8] and Christopher Weermantry[9] — both at one time judges of the International Court of Justice. Christopher Weermantry’s dissenting opinion in the Nuclear Weapons cases before the ICJ in 1996 was one of the most notable judicial opinions ever written in an international case.[10] One of the most memorable articles I read, and still sometimes revisit, was the 1991 article in the American Journal of International Law by Hilary Charlesworth, now a judge of the International Court of Justice, Christine Chinkin, a barrister and now emeritus professor at the London School of Economic and Political Science (LSE), and Shelly Wright, a notable Canadian lawyer, academic, and alumni of LSE, entitled ‘Feminist Approaches to International Law’.
As most students of law know, or will undoubtedly learn, to flourish in the law requires an extraordinary amount of reading. I have merely recounted some examples from the past. I have foregone more recent recollections as those students of law are surely developing themselves. These achievements of friends, colleagues, peers, forefathers, and mothers were a distinct influence on how I pursued the law. But, by far, the greatest influence did not come from the books I read or even the substantial personalities with which I was privileged to have shared professional experiences; instead, it was the people who you are unlikely to read about in books. They were extraordinary people who had more courage than I could ever imagine. They were people who simply saw justice as humanity, who taught me more about the law than any university or law book. They were individuals and groups who understood the meaning of justice better than anyone I have ever known.
Martha was a refugee from Ethiopia who was one of 15 000 refugees I represented to claim their rights to a fair process when, in the mid-1990s, the Government of Sudan colluded with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. They aimed to send refugees back to death, or at least oppression, in the country from which they fled. Martha and her compatriots, using translators from Ethiopia, had the courage to fight against the UNHCR. Many Ethiopians were sent back to their country and killed, often because they were sent to the frontline of the war without proper training or equipment.
Zoric was one of the ‘Abdić refugees’.[11] They were trapped between Zagreb and the Croatian border, with Bosnia and Hercegovina, after having miraculously fled through the front lines of an ongoing armed conflict. They were gradually killed along the five kilometres of road where they had been stopped by Croatian forces. Fortunately, we were able to draw attention to their plight, forcing Croatia to review their asylum applications and encourage UNHCR to consider their resettlement.
Ahmed stayed in the closed city of Nablus to ensure an adequate legal education for Palestinian students. He submitted to the Western encouragement to hold fair and free elections, which his party won and made him Minister of Justice, only to see the United States and European Union refuse to pay the ministry’s employees. He withstood life in a city which suffered an incursion of an unlawful occupying power every single night. They destroyed civilian houses with little concern for whether they were inhabited.
Omar was one of the two and half million displaced Sudanese who had fled from the violence in the Southern part of, then united, Sudan only to be treated like a third-class citizen in Khartoum. Over a period of three years, he assisted me in acquiring the power of representation for these people by getting several hundreds of thousands of signatures, or thumbprints, from people with almost nothing to their names. His help provided legitimacy for the negotiations with the Sudanese government to encourage them to recognize more rights of the internally displaced people who made up half of the Khartoum State. Eventually, this effort was superseded when South Sudan became an independent state.
Mohamed was elected as President of his nation in the first fair and free election to take place in the recent history of Egypt. He was then overthrown by a military coup d’etat backed by Western powers — this still plagues his country today. Mohamed stood for freedom for his citizens. Before he died in the hands of his captors, he sent a note from prison encouraging his people to remain committed to their freedom and ensuring them that one-day justice would come.
It is Martha, Zoric, Ahmed, Omar, Mohamed, and the countless unnamed individuals and groups of individuals I have had the privilege to represent, advise, and share life experiences with, who were the inspiration for my commitment to justice.
Curtis Doebbler[12]
[1] The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention is a Special Mechanism of the Human Rights Council, which itself is a subsidiary body of the UN General Assembly. Because of the Working Group’s two decisions about the Iraqi Special Tribunal it can’t be used as an example for future international tribunals and it is seen as an embarrassment by the UN and most international lawyers I’ve met.
[2] I have written about the coercion and threats, including threats to my life if I raised fair trial norms, by Wiliam Wiley, who first allegedly worked for the UN and then for the Court, but whose ostensible task was to intimidate the lawyers for the defendants. See: Curtis Doebbler and Ramsey Clark, The Iraqi Special Tribunal: An Abuse of Justice [A Draft Report] (Lulu 2011).
[3] Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, ‘Reinventing the UN: a proposal’ ( El 19, 2011) <https://www.el19digital.com/app/webroot/tinymce/source/2022/Abril/26Abr/POq%20ENGLISH%20SC%20b%20Book%20vr%20English%2030%2009%2011.pdf> accessed 22 December 2023.
[4] Especially in his poem titled ‘Identity Card’.
[5] For example, her poem titled ‘Still I Rise’.
[6] For example, Myres McDougal, Harold Lasswell, Lung Chu-Chen, Human Rights and World Public Order: The Basic Policies of an International Law of Human Dignity (2nd edn, Oxford University Press 2018).
[7] See: Richard Falk, Predatory Globalization: A Critique (Wiley 1999).
[8] Mohammed Bedjaoui, Towards a new international economic order (Homes & Meier Publishers 1979).
[9] Christopher Weermantry, ‘Nuclear Weapons and Scientific Responsibility’ (1987) 27 Journal of the Indian Law Institute 351.
[10] Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, Advisory Opinion, ICJ Reports 1996.
[11] Known due to their leader, Fikret Abdić, who was a Bosnian politician who established a fiefdom in Eastern Bosnia and Hercegovina that opposed the central government and was later defeated by the central government causing Abdić’s followers to flee.
[12] Research Professor of Law, University of Makeni, Sierra Leone, and proprietor of The Law Office of Dr Curtis FJ Doebbler, San Antonio, Texas, and Washington, D.C., USA.