LAWYERS
without BORDERS Three USC Gould graduates grapple with the world’s most harrowing cases – genocide and war crimes committed in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Balkans. By Gilien Silsby
SHORTLY AFTER GRADUATING from the USC
Gould School of Law and taking the bar exam last year, three fledgling lawyers departed for far-flung regions of the world and found themselves immersed in cruelty, torture and murder. Brian Rifkin in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Shannon Raj in Arusha, Tanzania, and Trevar Kolodny in The Hague, Netherlands, were among six 2011 USC Gould graduates who worked on trials involving some of history’s worst crimes against humanity: respectively, the Cambodian Killing Fields of the 1970s, the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and atrocities committed during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Their classmates Seepan Parseghian, Aysha Pamukcu and Jamie Hoffman also worked on these trials. After spending their final semester at USC Gould’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC), the graduates were invited to work with the United Nations as judicial interns at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (in Arusha) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. They received the coveted invitations after spending their last year at USC remotely working for judges at these human rights tribunals – a first for law students at an American university. “The judges were impressed with the students’ work and were eager to have them on-site,”
says USC Gould professor and IHRC director Hannah Garry. USC Gould dean Robert K. Rasmussen recruited Garry in 2010 to launch the clinic. “I considered it a priority to establish a clinic at the law school that would prepare students for working in a globalized world,” he says, adding that USC Gould alumni contributed to grants that helped cover each student’s travel and expenses. Once at the tribunals, the law graduates spent their days sifting through documents implicating the “most wanted” for genocide, including notorious leaders of the Khmer Rouge, Rwandan Hutu officials and architects of the Yugoslav wars. The interns worked side by side with judges at the tribunals, where prosecutors brought charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. In roles similar to that of judicial clerks in the United States, they drafted opinions, attended court hearings, wrote legal memoranda and examined witness testimonies. Garry, who has worked on international human rights and international criminal law issues for nearly two decades, traveled to Cambodia last October, reconnecting with some of the interns and cementing ties with the ECCC. She and Rifkin witnessed such dramatic events as a German judge resigning from the bench. The judge said his work on