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WCL’s War Crimes Research Office:
A decade spent helping hold war criminals accountable

BY MIKE UNGER

They toil for the men, women, and children throughout the world toward whom a deaf ear too often has been turned. Their work, confidential and completed with little fanfare, is executed on behalf of those in most dire need of an ally. They strive for justice.

It may not always be the sexiest of legal work, but make no mistake about it—the efforts of the staff and students at Washington College of Law’s War Crimes Research Office (WCRO) are invaluable to the global community.

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A decade after its inception, the WCRO continues to tackle projects central to its core mission: assisting international criminal courts and tribunals in working to hold war criminals, human rights violators, and the perpetrators of genocide responsible for their crimes. Exactly what specific research the office produces remains a mystery; in order to encourage creativity and openness, it extends a pledge of confidentiality to its clients.

“Our work remains the promotion and enforcement of international criminal and humanitarian law,” says Susana SaCouto, the office’s director since May 2004. “On an intellectual level, there are so many unanswered questions. It’s a creative area of the law; it’s a moving, evolving, developing area of the law; and it’s exciting in that way. But more importantly, it’s about the victims. These are victims of mass crimes, and to the extent that those most responsible are held accountable, there is some hope, I think, for the victims.”

Due in large part to Cold War tensions, the concept of international criminal trials lay dormant following the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials in 1946 until the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1993. The WCRO was founded two years later when a prosecutor involved with that court asked WCL to look into myriad legal questions surrounding those cases. WCL professors Diane Orentlicher, the office’s faculty director for its first nine years, and Robert Goldman are among the preeminent experts in the fields of international criminal law and the laws of war, respectively, so AU was a natural choice.

“The project was the brainchild of two students—Rochus Pronk and Brian Tittemore—who were aware that I provided legal advice to the first prosecutor of the [International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda] and told me that they would like to make a similar contribution under my supervision,” Orentlicher says. “Much of our work was that of legal archaeologists—excavating law that had not been enforced for decades—while updating it in light of postwar legal developments.”

Throughout the ’90s, a series of other tribunals, known as hybrids for their blending of both international and national elements, were created under the auspices of the United Nations. Several of these, including the Special Panels for Serious Crimes in East Timor, became WCRO clients. The Special Court for Sierra Leone, a West African nation of about 5 million ravaged by civil war, now is a major WCRO client.

“To a great extent, our success will be attributable to your War Crimes Research Office to which we owe an enormous debt of gratitude,” reads a quote from the Sierra Leone court’s chief prosecutor, Desmond de Silva, in a WCRO pamphlet.

The office is funded primarily by foundations, such as the Open Society Institute, because it works for its clients on a pro bono basis. A full-time staff of three and three to five law students, known as dean’s fellows, make up what SaCouto calls “a lean mean fighting machine.”

The fellows each work 20 hours a week, researching complicated legal questions posed by clients, questions that often have no definitive right or wrong answer. Katharine Brown, a third-year law student, spent almost all of last semester researching a single legal question.

“It’s very challenging,” Brown says. “You have to cobble together a lot of law. You look at what previous courts have said; you have to figure our what is customary law. It’s basically quilting together different case law. A lot of it is gray area. We’re just trying to provide our clients with a very objective view. When you do try to come up with an answer that no one has tried to answer before, you feel like you’re doing something really unique and original, and to know that you are doing something very challenging makes you work.”

It is that sort of in-the-trenches experience that SaCouto considers essential for those fashioning a career in international or human rights law.

“There are very few places like this that offer students an opportunity to work directly with the international tribunals, holding perpetrators of mass crimes accountable,” she says. “This is a whole area of law, and when you apply it with the kind of depth and specialized research that we do, students get a whole different perspective on what this work entails.”

The WCRO enjoys a sterling national and international reputation and often is credited for attracting students, including Brown, to WCL. More than 300 people attended its Sept. 30 conference on international criminal tribunals in the twenty-first century.

“This is certainly a draw,” SaCouto says. “There are other universities that do some work with international tribunals in a clinic sort of setting, but this is a unique office. It gives students an opportunity that they can’t get elsewhere.”

Brown, 26, is aiming toward a career in the field of human rights, and listening to her speak about her experiences at WCRO, it’s easy to see why.

“A lot of times the legal questions that we’re answering are very narrow,” she says. “You’re not even talking about the actual crime that is committed, you’re talking about due process or a ruling on evidence. It’s great to be reminded that what I’m doing is a small piece of a bigger puzzle that involves helping people. A lot of it is about a sense of justice. In a lot of the tribunals that have taken place so far there’s been a lot of problems. When you have these procedural flaws it can affect the outcome even if it doesn’t go to the actual facts of the case. It affects whether the person will be punished for the crimes that they committed. Often you’re working so hard on a very narrow issue that you forget about why you’re doing what you’re doing. It always helps me whenever I feel frustrated to step back and think about who I’m helping.”