5 minute read
Seeking Justice
IC Alumnus fights for changes in the Lebanese Judicial System
Weakening state institutions. A court system with limited resources. Prisoners presumed guilty until proven innocent. The interference of political parties. An indifferent parliament. A politically unstable government. Widespread corruption.
And in the midst, a group of lawyers desperately trying to do their jobs: securing fair trials for their clients.
“A judicial system is the pillar of any society,” said Ghida Frangieh ‘00, “a judicial system solves conflicts. It is supposed to support the people, solve grievances and punish the guilty. A judicial system protects the weakest and treats people equally especially when they are not equal socially and economically.”
But not so in Lebanon. Bluntly put, it is not working well.
“It is an exhausted system,” she said simply. Any rose tinted glasses were brutishly snatched when she decided to return to Lebanon in 2006 to practice law. Her training in France and the UK did very little to prepare her for the realities of the Lebanese judicial system.
Still, the lawyer decided to stay. She knew she could make a difference. “You cannot give up on your court system if you want to build a stronger state.”
Somewhere along the line, she became a lawyer, lobbyer, researcher and practitioner. “My clients benefit from my research knowledge and policy work,” she explained. “And my policy work benefits from my practical experience as a practitioner lawyer and litigator.”
Frangieh is what is called a Public Interest Lawyer, which basically means that in addition to taking on individual cases, she and her partners in the Saghieh Law Firm, fight to achieve social changes on a broader level.
Growing up in a highly political family, Frangieh was privy to many social debates and arguments at the dinner table. During her secondary years at IC, Frangieh co-founded the
Student Representative Council. She spent the summer of 1999, writing up its bylaws. Her efforts paid off as the SRC became very active in social issues across the country.
On her own time, she volunteered in Palestinian refugee camps. The experience catalyzed the budding Human Rights lawyer within. “I never really set out to be a lawyer,” she said. “But I was very interested in public interest and social issues and being a lawyer was the perfect tool to initiate much needed changes in society.”
But it was her work in Lebanon’s prison system that really opened her eyes. “People were being detained during their trial,” she said, “which illegally assumes that people are guilty before proven innocent. The prisons are bursting with such cases. I couldn’t just turn my back on this.”
Today, joining forces with other lawyers, Frangieh has taken on the biggest challenge of her life: empowering judges with tried and tested cases and equipping them with pertinent policies and research needed to pass fair judgments. The aim is to create precedents in social policies.
Technically, this is the job of the Parliament.
“We tried that way,” she said. “It doesn’t work because Parliament is only legislating out of necessity.”
Legislative constipation, as she called it.
The lawyers now head straight to the judges. “If Parliament is not doing its job to improve our laws, then it’s up to the judges to do that.” Most judges are reportedly intrigued by this new brand of lawyers. Frangieh never goes empty handed. Armed with research and previous lawsuits, the lawyer visits various judges and aptly delivers her arguments.
Unfortunately, there is no shortage of social issues. One of her teams’ recent successes is decreasing the higharrest of drug users. In 1998, a law was approved calling for treatment rather than punishment when it came to drug use. Despite its ratification, the law still hadn’t been enforced when Frangieh entered the legal scene in 2006. “Drug users were still being imprisoned. We wanted to change this policy because drug use should be dealt with as a medical issue rather than a criminal issue,” she said.
Frangieh and her team set themselves up for a fight. Representing a small group of drug users, they finally made it to the high court. Finally in 2013, fifteen years after the law was first approved, a small coup: the courts ruled that drug users choosing treatment could not be punished.
Frangieh was elated.
But now the second and crucial step: enabling other lawyers to follow the same route.
Accordingly, a “Model Defense” was published. The document developed a series of legal arguments that any lawyer could use in court when needed if dealing with a related case. “This is how we democratize the law with legal tools,” she said. “We developed a model defense for drug users, but also for refugees and gays who face criminal prosecution. We always publish these Model Defenses for all lawyers. Their defense is ready when their clients need it.”
Thanks to these efforts, the number of drug users in prison has drastically decreased, but not fully eliminated, Frangieh said.
“It really depends on the judges,” she said.
Frangieh’s work on other social issues currently include human trafficking, sexual rights, immigration and nationality, domestic workers, refugees, labor disputes, free speech and “many others,” she said.
The lawyer also provides legal support to several organizations working on various social issues. Unfortunately, all her work bears little success if and when political parties interfere.
“This automatically takes out the equality of both parties,” she said. “It is very frustrating and makes it difficult to get a fair trial.”
But Frangieh is not one to accept things. As a board member of Legal Agenda, an NGO attempting to lift the barriers between the law and society in Lebanon, she and the team have prepared a draft law to guarantee an independent an efficient court system. It took three years of research and negotiations but after much lobbying, it is finally in front of Parliament.
Now they wait. And wait. And wait. A very slow process. Frangieh and her colleagues refuse to give up. “You can’t give up.You just have to change strategies”. “A fair judicial system is the pillar of a society,” she said.
“People need to feel protected by it. If they do not feel protected, they will take things into their own hands. Then we are looking at violence and we are back to the chaos of the civil war. We need to change things. And who is going to make these changes if not us?”
