To Catch a Dictator by Reed Brody

Author:Reed Brody
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

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Six weeks later, we were in the Great Hall of Justice where the ICJ sits, surrounded by elaborate gardens in The Hague’s ornate Peace Palace. Everything about the court oozed tradition and diplomatic protocol. Court President Hisashi Owada, a Japanese aristocrat whose daughter was married to the crown prince of Japan, conducted the proceedings in French, flanked by the other fourteen judges, all male, seated grandly below the courtroom’s enormous stained-glass windows.

Senegal argued that the case was moot because its government was not disputing the obligation to prosecute Habré. It just needed time to raise the money. There was also no reason to issue an order to keep Habré within its borders because he did not have a passport and the Senegalese government had no intention of letting him go. His house was guarded night and day by an elite unit of the national gendarmerie, and he had no means of escape.

I wished I could put more credence in the expressions of good faith that the five Senegalese lawyers made throughout their representations to the court. I knew from hard experience, though, that such statements from the Senegalese government were rarely sincere. I wished, too, that we could offer our own arguments to the judges. But we were not parties to the case and could only listen in silence.

I thought Belgium’s case was strong on the merits, but to argue successfully for a preliminary injunction it had to demonstrate not only that Senegal was obliged to prosecute or extradite Habré but that Belgium also had legal rights of its own that an injunction would be able to protect.

I worried that the leader of Belgium’s legal team, Professor Eric David, was not making the right arguments to establish the second part of this requirement. Eric had been the intellectual inspiration behind Belgium’s universal jurisdiction law, and he also happened to be a friend of mine—not to mention the landlord of my house in Brussels. He was an idealist who sought to expand the reach of human rights law in any way he could, and I admired him for that. But courtroom strategy was not necessarily his strong suit; he’d been on the losing side at the ICJ when Belgium was defeated by the Congo.

Eric’s argument before the justices began and ended with the dubious assertion that every country had a duty, not only under the torture convention but under customary international law, to extradite or prosecute the perpetrators of torture and crimes against humanity. He didn’t even address the question of what Belgium stood to lose without the injunction. Eric’s co-counsel, Sir Michael Woods, a former legal advisor to the British Foreign Office, sought to row back a little from this sweeping declaration by characterizing Belgium’s request as “narrow and practical.” But it was obvious from the judges’ body language that they were uncomfortable with what they were hearing.

Fortunately, one of the judges, Christopher Greenwood of Britain, threw Belgium a lifeline. He asked of both sides: “First, does Senegal give a solemn assurance to the Court that it will not allow Mr.

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