International Commission of Jurists
José (Pepe) Zalaquett Daher (March 10th, 1942 – February 15th, 2020)

José (Pepe) Zalaquett Daher (March 10th, 1942 – February 15th, 2020)

Feb 17, 2020 | Feature articles, News

A tribute to former ICJ Commissioner José Zalaquett by current ICJ Commisioner Alejandro Salinas Rivera (Chile).

After a prolonged and agonizing illness, our beloved José (Pepe) Zalaquett has passed away. Pepe, as his friends used to call him and as he was widely known, was a leading lawyer and professor of international human rights law.

However, he was much more than that. At heart, he was a gentle man, a curious and pleasant human being, very sensitive to the expressions of art.

As a lawyer and later as a law professor, he was characterized by his deep commitment to justice and respect for human rights.

This commitment also brought adverse consequences in his life, as he suffered persecution, jail and exile, during the Chilean dictatorship.

While in exile and away from his homeland, he joined Amnesty International, and soon after became the president of its board of directors.

Upon returning to Chile after 10 years of exile, he headed the Chilean section of Amnesty International, in what were strenuous times for the country.

Once democracy was re-established in Chile, he became part of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, known as the “Rettig” Commission. However, it should have been called the “Zalaquett” Commission instead, since he was the architect of the initiative which was later emulated in South Africa, El Salvador and other countries, which initiated similar processes.

Pepe, because of his strict commitment to justice and his veritable concern for the protection and promotion of human rights, was not confined in dogmas or prejudices; he was so generous, open and free minded that he would not settle for anything less than the best. This at times made him a quixote, facing solo against windmills.

Pepe was a lover of life, a sensitive soul and an art aficionado. He had an opinion over almost all artistic disciplines. He regularly wrote art columns and his reviews were very reputed.

Pepe was one of those humans who are scarce and yet essential for our society. He was a complex and wholesome personage, who left his mark after his demise.

He left behind a generation of spirited students and disciples trained at the Centre for Human Rights of the University of Chile, of which he was a co-Director, who will undoubtedly continue his legacy in human rights.

But even more, he left an impression, a way of doing things, an impalpable legacy that is quintessential for the times to come. Intellectual honesty, sensitivity and empathy towards the victims along with ethical austerity and geniality, are part of the legacy that Pepe leaves behind after passing through this life.

The ICJ feels privileged as an institution to count Pepe Zalaquett among its commissioners. His departure indisputably, is an irredeemable loss, but at the same time we are proud and grateful to have shared a common cause with him.

José, Pepe, thank you very much …

 

ICJ Commissioner Reed Brody: “Twenty years later, Pinochet’s arrest remains an inspiration”

ICJ Commissioner Reed Brody: “Twenty years later, Pinochet’s arrest remains an inspiration”

Sep 24, 2018 | Feature articles, News

On October 16, 1998, the former dictator of Chile Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London on a warrant from a Spanish judge. Reed Brody participated in the subsequent legal case.

Reed Brody went on to apply the “Pinochet precedent” in the landmark prosecution of the former dictator of Chad, Hissène Habré, who was convicted of crimes against humanity in Senegal in 2016.

He now works with victims of the former dictator of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh. The ICJ interviewed Brody about the Pinochet case and its legacy.

What was your role in the Pinochet case?

My role started when Pinochet was arrested in London. The case began long before that, of course, in the early years of Pinochet’s dictatorship when brave human rights activists documented each case of murder, and “disappearance.”

The ICJ worked with those advocates to produce a seminal 1974 report on those crimes, just six months after Pinochet’s coup. Shut out of Chile’s courts, even after the democratic transition of 1990, victims and their lawyers pursued a case against Pinochet in Spain under its “universal jurisdiction” law and when Pinochet traveled to London, Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón requested and obtained his detention.

When Pinochet challenged his arrest in court claiming immunity as a former head of state, I went to London for Human Rights Watch, and we and Amnesty International were granted the right to intervene with teams of lawyers in the proceedings at the judicial committee of the House of Lords, then Britain’s highest court.

The Lords cited our research in rejecting Pinochet’s immunity.

You famously described the Lords’ Pinochet decision as a “wake-up call” to tyrants everywhere. Looking back, do you think it was?

Actually no, I think one would be hard pressed to discern a change in the behavior of dictators. Mugabe didn’t quake in his boots, Saddam didn’t clean up his act.

The more important and more lasting effect of the case was to give hope to other victims and activists. When the Lords ruled that Pinochet could be arrested anywhere in the world despite his status as a former head of state, the movement was in effervescence.

As a human rights lawyer, I was used to being legally and morally right, but still losing. In the Pinochet case, not only did we win, but we upheld the detention of one of the world’s most iconic dictators.

The Pinochet case inspired victims of abuse in country after country, particularly in Latin America, to challenge the transitional arrangements of the 1980s and 1990s, which allowed the perpetrators of atrocities to go unpunished and, often, to remain in power.

These temporary accommodations with the ancien régime didn’t extinguish the victims’ thirst to bring their former tormentors to justice.

How did you go from Pinochet to Habré?

With Pinochet, we saw that universal jurisdiction could be used as an instrument to bring to book people who seemed out of the reach of justice.

Together with groups like Amnesty, the FIDH, and the ICJ (which wrote an important report on the Pinochet case and its lessons), we had meetings on who could be the “next Pinochet.”

That’s when Delphine Djiraibe of the Chadian Association for Human Rights asked us to help Habre’s victims bring him to justice in his Senegalese exile.

I was excited at the prospect of persuading a country in the Global South, Senegal, to exercise universal jurisdiction, because there was a developing paradigm of European courts prosecuting defendants from formerly colonized countries.

It took us 17 years, but Habré became the first prosecution ever of a former head of state using universal jurisdiction, and indeed the first universal jurisdiction trial in Africa.

1998 was a high water mark for international justice with the adoption of the ICC Rome Statute and Pinochet’s arrest. Neither the ICC nor universal jurisdiction have quite lived up to their expectations. Why?

International justice doesn’t operate in a vacuum, it’s conditioned by the global power structure. Each case, whether at the ICC level or the transnational level, is a product of the political forces which must be mobilized, or fended off, to allow a prosecution to proceed.

Those forces, particularly since September 11, 2001, have been hostile to human rights enforcement in general and to justice in particular. Universal jurisdiction has been subject to the same double standards as the ICC.

The Belgian and Spanish universal jurisdiction laws, which were the broadest in the world, were both repealed when they were used to investigate superpower actions.

But many of the most successful cases have been those in which the victims and their activist supporters have been the driving forces, have compiled the evidence themselves, built an advocacy coalition which placed the victims and their stories at the center of the justice struggle and helped create the political will in the forum state.

I’m thinking not just of Habré, but the genocide prosecution in Guatemala of the former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, the case in Haiti of “President for Life,” Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the Liberian cases brought around the world by Civitas Maxima and its partners, the Swiss cases initiated by TRIAL International, and the Syria litigation by ECCHR and others.

These cases were brought before domestic courts either of the country in which the atrocities took place (Guatemala, Haiti) or of foreign countries based on universal jurisdiction, rather than before international courts.

Most of these cases took advantage of legal regimes which allowed victims directly to participate in the prosecutions as “parties civiles,” or “acusación particular” rather than play passive or secondary roles in cases prosecuted solely by state or international officials.

How do victim-driven prosecutions look different than institutional cases?

When it’s the victims and their allies who get the cases before a court, who gather the evidence, and who have formal standing as parties, the trials are more likely to live up to their expectations.

In the Rios Montt case, for instance, the Asociación Para la Justicia y Reconciliacion (AJR) and the Centro Para la Acción Legal en Derechos Humanos (CALDH) mobilized the victims, developed the evidence, defined the narrative and, essentially, determined the outlines of the case and chose the witnesses who would testify for the prosecution.

In the Habré case, we spent 13 years building the dossier, interviewing hundreds of victims and former officials and uncovering regime police files. The victims’ coalition always insisted that any trial include crimes committed against each of Chad’s victimized ethnic groups, and that is exactly was happened.

In contrast, a distant prosecutor, disconnected from national narratives and inherently not accountable to the victims or civil society, can be tempted to narrowly tailor prosecutions in the hopes of securing a conviction or avoiding political resistance.

This was the case with the ICC in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for instance, where, as Pascal Kambale has persuasively argued, it betrayed the victims’ hopes.

Millions of civilians died in the DRC and Luis Moreno Ocampo only went after two local warlords. I think the current prosecutor is paying more attention to local realities.

The inspiration from victim-driven cases is also greater, and they are to some degree replicable. As Naomi Roht-Arriaza has written, these cases “stirred imaginations and opened possibilities precisely because they seemed decentralized, less controllable by state interests, more, if you will, acts of imagination.”

When I showed Chadian victims video clips of the Ríos Montt trial, they saw in those images exactly what they were trying to do.

Just as the Chadians came to us in the Habré case seeking to do what Pinochet’s victims had done, our hope in getting the Habré case to trial was that other survivors would be inspired by what Habre’s victims had done and say, “you see these people, they fought for justice and never gave up. We can do that too.”

And indeed, Liberian victims and Gambian victims have patterned their campaigns for justice on what Habre’s victims did. So, the Pinochet case continues to be an inspiration.

 

ICJ appoints five new Commissioners

ICJ appoints five new Commissioners

Jan 5, 2017 | News

Mr Reed Brody (United States), Ms Roberta Clarke (Barbados/Canada), Professor Juan Mendez (Argentina), Mr Alejandro Salinas Rivera (Chile) and Justice Kalyan Shrestha (Nepal) have recently been elected to join the ICJ.

The new Commissioners were elected by a ballot of existing Commissioners, which took place between November and December 2016.

Mr Reed Brody (United States) has 25 years on the cutting edge of the human rights movement. Mr Brody has worked, amongst other things, as a freelance activist, New York Assistant Attorney General, Director of the ICJ’s Centre for the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, Executive Director of the International Human Rights Group (now Global Rights), Director of the Human Rights Division of the UN Observer Mission in El Salvador, Deputy Director of the UN Secretary General’s Investigative Team in the Democratic Republic of Congo and at Human Rights Watch, including on such cases as those against the former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, and the former dictator of Chad, Hissène Habre.

Ms Roberta Clarke (Barbados/Canada) has an extensive background in working on human rights issues, particularly in relation to women’s rights and social and economic rights. Ms Clarke has held a number of Academic roles including  Research Assistant, Junior Research Fellow, Assistant Lecturer and now Visiting Fellow at the University of West Indies. Ms Clarke has also worked as an Attorney in private practice and in a number of civil society and intergovernmental organization roles including as the Project Coordinator of the Women and the Law Project with the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action in Trinidad and Tobago, Social Affairs Officer on the Gender and Development Programme for the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Regional Programme Director for UNIFEM/UN Women’s Caribbean Office and then for UN Women’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific.

Professor Juan Méndez (Argentina) is currently the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, having been appointed in November 2010 and then having had his mandate renewed in 2014. Professor Méndez is also a Professor of Human Rights Law in residence at the Washington College of Law. Previously Professor Méndez has worked in a number of human rights roles including as general counsel of Human Rights Watch,  Executive Director of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights in Costa Rica, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, President of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, Special Advisor to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as Co-Chair of the International Bar Association Human Rights Institute, as President of the International Center for Transnational Justice (ICTJ) and as Kofi Annan’s Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide.

Mr Alejandro Salinas Rivera (Chile) is a lawyer from Chile with expertise in international issues and cooperation, mining and labour law. Alejandro has collaborated with and ran leading national and international human rights organizations. He has worked as a consultant and adviser for the ICJ as well as for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the International Parliamentary Union and the Presidential Advisory Commission for human Rights Policy. He has been the head of a number of Departments and Units in various government agencies including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as Director of the Human Rights Department; the Attorney General’s Office as Chief of the Unit of International Affairs; and at the Public Defender’s Officer as Chief of Staff of the National Defender, Head of the Evaluation, Control and Claims Department and Head of the International Cooperation Unit.

Justice Kalyan Shrestha (Nepal) was Chief Justice of the Nepalese Supreme Court from 2005 until his retirement in 2016. Prior to this he served in a number of judicial roles including as Chief Judge of the Appellate Court Jumla, a Judge of various Zonal, District and Appellate courts,  Under Secretary in the Ministry of Justice and Law and as a Section Officer for the Supreme Court and Government of Nepal. Justice Shrestha has also held a number of senior roles in judicial bodies including as Chairperson of the Constituent Assembly Court, President of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation in Law, President of the Judges Society Nepal and as a Member of the Judicial Services Commission.

In addition to the election of five new members the following Commissioners have also been elected in the following capacity:

  • Professor Carlos Ayala (Venezuela) – elected for a second term as Commissioner and a third term on the Executive Committee
  • Justice Azhar Cahcalia (South Africa) – elected for a third term on the Executive Committee
  • Professor Andrew Clapham (United Kingdom) – elected to the Executive Committee
  • Professor Robert Goldman (United States) – elected for a second term as Vice-President
  • Ms Hina Jilani (Pakistan) – elected for a second term on the Executive Committee
  • Professor Sir Nigel Rodley (United Kingdom) – elected for a third term as President
  • Professor Marco Sassòli (Switzerland) – elected for a second term as alternate to the Executive Committee
  • Justice Stefan Trechsel (Switzerland) – elected for a second term as alternate to the Executive Committee

 

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