New Internship!

It is almost Christmastime here, and it is so weird to be walking down the street in a tank top past all the plastic Christmas trees, tinsel, and oversized Santa dolls in full red snowsuits. It seems that much of the American and Western European Christmas imagery didn’t get adapted to the climate here in the Southern Hemisphere.

Everyone here is busy taking tests, giving presentations, and pulling together budgets for the end of the year, and making plans for summer vacation. And I, who am usually up to my ears in Nothing To Do, finally have a real internship! Last week I started as a legal intern at CEJIL, or the Center for Justice and International Law. CEJIL is an NGO that works with the Inter-American System for the protection of human rights, which includes the Inter-American Commission and Inter-American Court on Human Rights. I am currently learning a ton about international law in general and the Inter-American Court in particular. To give a quick overview: most of the countries in the Organization of American States (not including the US and Canada, of course) signed the American Convention on Human Rights, a treaty that covers basic protections like the right not to be tortured, prohibition of slavery, and the right to a fair trial. If some individual or group of individuals in one of the member states are victims of human rights violations, they can bring the case before the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights. The Commission will consider the information presented by the individual or NGO bringing the complaint, as well as the State being petitioned against. The Commission can make recommendations to the State and give a certain time frame for them to be completed. If the State doesn´t comply, the Commission may then take the case to the Inter American Court, which has the power to deliver a sentence which may include a change of policy, public apologies, or monetary and other forms of reparation. At first it surprised me that any given country, if it was going to commit human rights abuses in the first place, would then be willing to comply with a sentence that required apologies and millions of dollars in fines. It´s not like you can send a country to prison for not obeying international laws. However, what people here have explained to me is that international law has a great deal to do with political and economic pressure from the international community. If you´re a poor Latin American country dependent on foreign aid, you are much more likely to comply with such a sentence if your alternative is economic sanctions by the rest of the world. This also explains why the US didn´t sign the American Convention on Human Rights - we don´t have to. Being an economic and military superpower makes it really difficult for the international community to hold the US accountable for the (multiple, serious) human rights violations it commits.

BUT, it is heartening to see the power of international law to hold at least some countries responsible for their actions. My specific project as an intern is to research jurisprudence on the rights of indigenous peoples. That basically means I read court decisions and write summaries of them so that the lawyers have quick access to the most important legal precedents without having to read every case. CEJIL is involved in almost all of the cases brought before the Inter-American Court, and also conducts trainings of legal service providers throughout Latin America. The research I´m doing will be consolidated into a manual to use for trainings for indigenous rights groups in the region. Supposedly I am going to be here for a month - from December 10th to January 11th - but I´m hoping that if there´s space and they want to keep me, I´ll be able to continue here, even if it´s on a part-time basis.