Table Of ContentLawyers Beyond Borders
LAWYERS BEYOND BORDERS
Advancing International Human Rights
Through Local Laws and Courts
Maria Armoudian
University of Michigan Press
Ann Arbor
Copyright © 2021 by Maria Armoudian
All rights reserved
For questions or permissions, please contact [email protected]
Published in the United States of America by the
University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid- free paper
First published September 2021
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data has been applied for.
ISBN 978- 0- 472- 13256- 0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978- 0- 472- 12904- 1 (e- book)
ISBN 978-0-472-03885-5 (paper: alk. paper)
Contents
Foreword vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
ONE Lawyers Beyond Borders: Introduction and Overview 1
TWO The Seeds of a Rights Revolution 18
THREE Litigation as Recovery: The Birth of the Center for
Justice and Accountability 35
FOUR The Burmese Connection 51
FIVE Rights and Redress in a “War on Terror” 72
SIX Private Military Profits and the Search for Justice 90
SEVEN The New Impunity 109
EIGHT The Globalization of Justice 125
NINE Retrauma and Resilience: The Dynamics of Clients
and Counsel 145
TEN The Making, Unmaking, and Remaking of
a Rights Revolution 158
vi Contents
Notes 163
Bibliography 213
Index 235
Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform
via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10038981
Foreword
This book is a story of creativity and hope and lawyers fighting for justice.
It is a story of how a relatively small group of attorneys devised a strategy
for representing victims of atrocities and human rights abuses across the
world. It is a story of how they developed legal theories that never had been
tried before to help victims and to prevent violations of rights in the future.
It is a story of their victories and also their frustration as an increasingly
conservative Supreme Court repeatedly has slammed the courthouse doors
closed for such cases.
As the dean of a law school, I also tell my students at commencement
about the power they will have as lawyers. I remind them that as lawyers,
they will have the chance for tremendous power: to take away lives or to
save them; to protect freedom or to compromise it; to protect our environ-
ment or aid in defiling it; to help companies do good things or to help them
do bad things.
This book tells about both kinds of lawyers. It is primarily about the
attorneys who dedicated their lives and their careers to helping victims of
human rights abuses. It tells of their enormous ingenuity in bringing suits
and fighting as hard as they could for justice. It tells of how they used a
statute adopted in the late 18th century, the Alien Tort Statute, to sue on
behalf of the victims of horrific abuse in the late 20th and early 21st centu-
ries. But it also tells how corporations fought back, using all their resources
to keep such suits from going forward and ultimately to greatly narrow this
important law.
Laws are meaningless unless they are enforced. Human rights, too, are
viii Foreword
merely words on paper unless there are courts to apply them and give them
redress. Victims of rights violations deserve to be compensated. And com-
pensation is essential to deter violations for the future. That, of course, is
the premise of all liability in the legal system and it is why suits for human
rights violations are so important. It is also why what the Supreme Court
has done to the Alien Tort Statute in so limiting its use is so awful and so
important. If the United States courts are not available for victims to sue,
there likely will be no forum in the world.
As I read this wonderful book, I realized that I want all my law stu-
dents, and all students and prospective law students everywhere, to read it.
The lawyers described in this book and their efforts fighting for justice for
victims of human rights violations are a model for all of us. It shows that
through law we really can make a huge difference. It also shows that even if
we fail, it is a fight that is so very important. Maria Armoudian’s beautifully
written book is a reminder for us all of the power of law and therefore the
power of each of us to use it to make the world better.
Erwin Chemerinsky
Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley School of Law
Preface
Seventy- plus years after “never again,” the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and subsequent international
agreements to end torture and genocide, human rights atrocities have
remained a steady fact of life— with little meaningful abatement in sight.1
These aspirational agreements suffer from political, physical, legal, and
societal barriers to realization,2 leaving millions of victims “below the
law”— beyond the law’s protection— while their offenders too often remain
above it. Obviously, things can—a nd do— change. History is rife with such
examples— through some combination of ideas, human agency, and struc-
tures. Thanks to scholars, we know a bit about how and why they occur.3
In the complicated realm of realizing international human rights, in
preventing or redressing atrocities, I hadn’t seen many viable solutions—
particularly when violators remained protected by laws of immunity, juris-
diction, sovereignty, or more practical issues around power, wealth, or
friends in high places. When I learned about US lawyers, using their tool—
litigation— in their own land—t he United States—t o bring some restitu-
tion to victims in faraway lands, I wanted to understand: How had they
come up with these ideas? How did they persuade other lawyers, courts of
law, or Congress to support unconventional ideas about redress? How did
they influence the legal landscape, and how did the work, in turn, affect
the survivors and the advocates themselves? What happens in the slow,
dynamic process of making— or trying to make— new pathways to justice?
This part of lawmaking includes but transcends the institutions. It is the
part of law, the painstaking construction of rights and redress that begins
