Less than ten years after the creation of the UN tribunals, the pioneers of international justice are carving out new careers for themselves. During the last week of October, Pascal Besnier and André Ferran made a discreet reappearance at the Rwanda Tribunal. Five years ago, the two French lawyers were among the first defence counsel to be appointed at the fledgling and faltering ICTR. Besnier, a lawyer with the Paris bar, was assigned the case of a Kibuye shopkeeper Obed Ruzindana, who had just been arrested in Kenya. Ferran, President of the Montpelier bar, went down into ICTR history by attending one of its first hearings in Arusha in May 1996, for the initial appearance of his new client Clement Kayishema. The ex-prefect of Kibuye was among the first three prisoners to be detained at the UN jail in Tanzania which now houses fifty inmates.

The Arusha Gold Mine
From 1996 to June 2001, Besnier and Ferran were officially mandated to defend the two men accused of genocide, at the expense of the Tribunal. Their contract only expired de facto on June 1, 2001 when the appeals court upheld in full the rulings handed down by the trial chambers. Kayishema and Ruzindana were found guilty of genocide committed in Rwanda between April and July 1994, and sentenced to life in prison and 25 years' respectively.
The lawyers' African adventure had clearly given them the bug for the international courts. After the trial stage of their clients' cases had ended, the two defenders immediately added their names to the list of potential lawyers at the ICTR's sister institution, the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). But alas, positions at The Hague are highly sought-after. Serbian defendants at the ICTY are generally assigned lawyers from their own country, and the chances of international lawyers landing a case are further reduced owing to the glut of candidates for this tribunal located in the heart of Western Europe. Having failed to secure a double whammy in both UN courts, Besnier and Ferran decided to back their old horse and return to Arusha. Henceforth, the elegant Parisian lawyer will be donning his political hat in defence of the former Minister of Finance, Emmanuel Ndindabahizi, while the eloquent barrister Ferran will be lending his moustache to the military, representing the interests of François-Xavier Nzuwonemeye, the former head of an elite squadron in the old Rwandan army.

No Accumulation of Cases
Defence lawyers at the Arusha and Hague tribunals are not allowed to take on two cases at a time. There are various reasons behind the UN administration's decision to impose a limit on caseloads, but the key factor was out of a concern that in an eminently political environment the defence should not be monopolised by a small coterie of lawyers. True to the spirit of the UN, there was also a desire to ensure geographical diversity among the assigned counsel. Yet with the development of the tribunals and the increased workload, such criteria now appear less crucial. Professional experience, coupled with a cordial relationship with the UN civil servants who make the envied appointments, has become a key factor. But the rule of one case at a time remains. Counsels Besnier and Ferran, having completed their first cases, are thus the first in Arusha to be given a second helping. By so doing, these experienced lawyers illustrate a broader trend in the evolution of international justice - the opportunity for new careers.

Roundtrip from The Hague to Arusha
In this regard, two men have always been one step ahead of their colleagues. The Anglo-Dutch duo Steven Kay and Michael Wladimiroff were the first in the field back in 1996, working to defend Duskö Tadic, the first person to be tried by an international UN tribunal. Having whet their appetites with the ICTY, the two lawyers resumed their duet in 1999 to pace the hills of Rwanda. By defending Alfred Musema before the ICTR, they became the first defence lawyers to put both ad hoc courts onto their curriculum vitae. Since then, others have followed in their footsteps. The British lawyers Howard Morrison and Michael Greaves, who served in The Hague after Kay, are today in charge of different cases pending at the Arusha Tribunal. Moreover, the experience seems to have been a particularly rewarding since after working on the Tadic case Steven Kay was honoured by his peers with the highly envied title of Queen's Counsel, an elite club of barristers of the British Crown. In 2001, he was joined by two of his colleagues practising at the ICTR: counsels Morrison and Ellis.

During the recent ardent competition to join the defence team of the most famous defendant at The Hague Tribunal, the Kay-Wladimiroff team pulled off another coup. Admittedly, Slobodan Milosevic did not choose these lawyers since he refused to be represented. But despite such an obstacle, the list of those who aspired to have their reputation as professional lawyers gilded by the infamy of such a client was very long. From hundreds of candidates, Wladimiroff and Kay were chosen by the ICTY registrar on the basis of their hitherto unrivalled experience acquired in the international courts. They undoubtedly received this professional recognition due to their nonpolitical profiles. Such a trait brings them closer to counsels Besnier and Ferran, who had hardly been tempted by the political platform offered by the UN tribunals. It is likely that henceforth such a career path will be much more open to this type of lawyer, who is inspired by law more than ideology, given that the candidates for assignment to defendants who are generally declared indigent have to be ratified by a UN administration that is easily irritated by political attacks.

The Group of Politicians
From this angle, the adversary and international competitor of a man such as Steven Kay is someone like Christopher Black. The Canadian is defending General Ndindiliyimana before the ICTR. However, he is also an important member of the International Committee for the Defense of Slobodan Milosevic. Within the legal department of this highly political committee, which, moreover, is calling for the abolition of the ICTY, are three lawyers whose ICTR experience has been far more discreet. The first, Quebec lawyer André Tremblay, has teamed up with his compatriot John Philpot to form certainly the most politicised duo to have acted in Arusha, in the context of Jean-Paul Akayesu's appeals procedure. The second is also Canadian, David Jacobs, who is currently spearheading the appeal for Georges Rutaganda, the former Rwandan leader of the Interahamwe militia. The third, most famous of all, and doubtless the most intelligent is Ramsey Clark, the 73-year-old former US Attorney-General in the 1960s, former defender of the Bosnian leader Radovan Karadzic and currently an ICTR lawyer for the defence of the Seventh- Day Adventist Rwandan pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana. For this group of lawyers, the development of international justice constitutes a prime platform for political commitments that date back way before the Tribunal and are not necessarily directly linked to it.

The Timor Route
East Timor is a good example of the career path of these international lawyers. Among the pioneers of the evolving international criminal law, one lawyer has a particularly original profile. Jean-Louis Gilissen, a sharp Belgian lawyer with a rare human touch, arrived in Arusha in 1997 as the defence lawyer for Georges Ruggiu, the Belgian-Italian former radio broadcaster at the extremist Hutu radio station, RTLM, during the Rwandan genocide. For two and a half years, in tandem with his colleague counsel Aouini, he tactfully and efficiently accompanied his client towards confession. The man opposite him on the prosecution bench, with whom he enjoyed privileged cooperation on this delicate case, was the man heading prosecutions at the ICTR's office of the prosecutor, the Tanzanian Mohamed Othman. Both men got along well together and respected each other. The Ruggiu case was closed, without appeal, on June 1, 2001. The following month, Mohamed Othman left the ICTR to become Chief Prosecutor of East Timor, a territory under UN administration pending its independence, where a special investigation unit was created for crimes committed in 1999 by the pro-Indonesian militias of the Jakarta Army. In addition to Mohamed Othman, at least four others from the ICTR prosecutor's office have been assigned key positions in the « special unit » in Timor after having spent a minimum of four years between Kigali and Arusha. Three other members of this small team also received their passports for Dili thanks to contacts they had made in Tanzania. But the eighth person to defect from the ICTR to Timor is the most unexpected. In 2001, Jean-Louis Gilissen, the former defence lawyer, was made deputy prosecutor to Othman, a fruitful result of their professional relationship forged during the Ruggiu case.

Swarms
The networks established in the ad hoc tribunals do not end there. If the investigations and proceedings on the Rwandan genocide were lent great support in Switzerland, this is partly owing to the fact that the examining judges Renaud Weber and Barbara Ott had themselves worked as ICTR investigators in its formative years, in 1995 and 1996. Canada, which recently passed a law allowing it to initiate large scale proceedings for crimes against humanity, recruited into its specialised team a certain Robert Petit, a lawyer from Quebec who had for many years worked in the investigation department of the ICTR's office of the prosecutor. Thus in less than ten years, a generation of lawyers have found new career opportunities in the evolving international justice system which should give added reinforcements to the future Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone.

From Justice to Politics

Justice and politics often go hand in hand, but it is rarely a marriage made in heaven. Several officials at the Rwanda Tribunal have decided to trade in their lawyers' robes for the sharp suits of political office. The most successful of such chameleons has to be former prosecutor Pierre-Richard Prosper, who at 35, became famous for winning the first conviction before the ICTR, that of Jean-Paul Akayesu in September 1998.
No sooner had he completed his two-years of hard, yet competent work in Kigali and Arusha, than the young Haitian-born American was appointed advisor to the United States Ambassador for War Crimes, a new position created under the Clinton administration. For two years, Pierre Prosper cut his political teeth in the shadow of his boss David Scheffer. But with the victory of the Republican George Bush in the presidential elections, officially ratified in December 2000, the ambassador was forced to pack his bags, attempting in vain to get elected as an ICTY judge. His diplomatic post itself, which had cautiously advanced the cause of international justice, also narrowly escaped being scrapped with the arrival of a government openly hostile to a permanent international court. It was Colin Powell, the first African-American Secretary of State, who finally managed to keep the post alive, thanks to the support of the young Pierre Prosper, whose political leanings, cleverly enough, had not been apparent. Three years after earning his stripes in Arusha, the ex-prosecutor-turned ambassador made a seamless transition into the political arena to which he clearly aspired.

Shifting Ground
The second half of 2001 saw an increased shift by certain ICTR members towards the attractions of political office. The most prestigious nomination, as it were, is that of Françoise Ngendahayo, the former influential advisor to Registrar Okali, as minister in the new transitional government of Burundi, which Nelson Mandela commandeered into place on November 1. Tasked with overseeing gender issues, Françoise Ngendahayo had for four years played a key role in smoothing out political relations between the Registrar of the Tribunal and the Rwandan government. The prize for the flashiest feat of professional parachuting goes to Antoine Mindua, a legal assistant in the ICTR registry, who was appointed in August as « plenipotentiary ambassador » of the Democratic Republic of Congo to the UN institutions in Geneva. But of all the recent career moves, Bernard Muna's has to be the most prolific. A powerful deputy prosecutor during Louise Arbour's reign, thrown out of his post by Carla del Ponte in May 2001, the Cameroonian is no newcomer to politics. In fact, he was born into it. After his forced exit from the ICTR, the natural-born politician has been asserting himself, to the great displeasure of certain high-ranking ICTR members who are well aware that the court has been often criticised for its lack of independence vis-à-vis the Rwandan government. Bernard Muna has been making regular trips to Rwanda on behalf of a nongovernmental organisation to work on the new Constitution for the land of a thousand hills. Clearly, justice and politics never fail to be the source of more or less conflicting interests.