Getting into development

Saturday 8.50am I’ve been invited to speak at an event on Human rights and international development organised by Oxfid an Oxford university organisation that does great work raising the development profile amongst it’s students. Jo Evans the co president who invited me came to our ‘Getting into International Development’ event previously and has quickly got involved with Oxfid in the first year of her degree. What I’ve forgotten is my phone and Hilary Mantel book. On the other hand I’ve got a bacon sandwich and a tea and I’m waiting for the bus to move off

9.20am Despite the fact that I’m already on board the bus keeps stopping to pick up other passengers. If people choose to live in Hillingdon can they really expect buses from London to pick them up? The bus is the Oxford ‘tube’ – just £16 return or 2 euros with free ‘wi-fi’ and autumn sunshine.

10.50am Everything going worryingly smoothly as I arrive in good time. I foolishly think this is because I have my life handled and am now anxious about it all being part of a practical joke by the Supreme Being.

11am Transitional justice in the African great lakes region. Phil Clark an Oxford research fellow gave a really interesting talk on Rwanda and it’s post genocide justice system. Incidentally without a single PowerPoint slide. ‘Transitional Justice’ refers to the range of processes and mechanisms that are are put in place in states emerging from a period of conflict. In Rwanda’s case of course, it is after the genocide that saw a million people, mainly Tutsis, killed in 100 days in 1994. Phil explained that this was an unusually ‘intimate’ genocide in the sense that the killers generally knew their victims as friends, neighbours and even family members. Intimate also in the sense that the violence was hand-to-hand and the weapons were low tech – axes, spears and the like. This had a number of consequences

The conflict was pervasive. Every Rwandan after the conflict was either a perpetrator, a survivor or was closely related to someone in those categories.

The Tutsi (the Rwandan Patriotic Front) group that overthrew the regime that had planned the genocide soon found themselves with around 120,000 young Hutu suspects in jails designed for 45,000 and a survivor population clamouring for justice and that would not accept the proposed amnesty solution to the backlog of cases. A truth and reconciliation commission on the south African model was also unacceptable because of its emphasis on ‘amnesty’ in return for confessions.

The solution hived off the most serious high level cases to a UN supervised International Criminal Court(ICC). A second layer of serious cases to be dealt with by the Rwandan national courts and in an innovative and radical programme to have the majority of cases dealt with by a form of community justice. The village Gacaca courts were given a legal status, codified into law, made representative by incorporating a formal role for women and with locally elected judges and then rolled out to 9,000 Rwandan villages.

Phil Clark’s main point is that these courts have been, in general, successful despite the criticisms of the international legal community. They have prosecuted between 300,000 and 400,000 cases and exposed up to 200,000 more. Those found guilty have been given either prison sentences or community sentences – such as rebuilding homes or working on roads. The backlog of cases has been cleared up without simply letting perpetrators go. On the downside most survivors feel the courts have been too lenient (which is the opposite of what legal commentators feared would happen) and the proposal that the courts could take on the backlog of cases from the ICC has been opposed by organizations such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. One consequence of this criticism in Britain is that Hutu suspects instead of being sent back to Rwanda to face justice have been allowed to stay free in Britain and may not face any trial at all.

I asked Phil why he had said Amnesty was not an ‘independent’ organization. He explained that what he meant that was that their opposition to the Gacaca courts was not based on local empirical research in Rwanda but based on interviews with the Rwandan diaspora. Amnesty, he felt, had a poor understanding of the nature of the courts which are alien to their professional legal minds.

12.15pm Thoughts turning to lunch. I spotted some evil looking sandwiches and fruit – the key indicators of a deeply unsatisfying ‘buffet lunch’ I feel like invoking the UN charter dedicated to Jeff Riley’s lunch human rights.

• An inalieanable right to a Hot lunch

• Hot lunches should include a proper pudding and not just fruit

• When acting as a guest speaker he will not be obliged to queue

• He shall not pay

I fear most of these principles are about to be breached. Once again underlining the importance of rights in the arena of jeff Riley to move off the page and into the real world menu.

1.30pm The Iraq War and International Law. After lunch another excellent talk by Andrew Williams from the University of Warwick. Again no PowerPoint just an expert talking about what he knew. In this case a number of disturbing cases where claims that Iraqi citizens had been abused and tortured by members of the British Army and calls for inquiries had met with resistance from the UK government. A contrast drawn between the government’s public position that human rights violations are not tolerated and there is no cooperation with governments implicated. All shocking cases. More details from the Public Interest Lawyers in Birmingham www.publicinterestlawyers.co.uk

3.30pm After this powerful contribution I was in a slightly stupefied state when I stood up to do my talk but it went okay I think. Anyway it all seemed slightly mundane and trivial compared to what I had heard before.