It seems that a lot of people are not allowed to talk about their work even just very generally. I am lucky enough to be able to say a little about the only case that I am working on. I am on the Appeals team of the Office of the Prosecutor in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague, and Popovic is the only case currently on appeal.

On the prosecution side, everything seems to be justified. The primary purpose of this ad hoc tribunal is to bring war criminals to justice, Thus there is an assumption that during the conflict in former Yugoslavia, there must have been many people who should be responsible for the atrocities committed. In the ICTY we can see posters similar to this. everywhere, and most of the time the guys on such posters are just defendants whose cases are still on appeal. It seems that the presumption of innocence does not always apply here. When I started the internship, I did not think this to be anything wrong: isn’t it the chief function of the tribunal? However, I am not so sure now after watching the live cast of the delivery of the Popovic trial judgment and later being assigned to help with the appeal of this case.

When the judge said “we think the only sentence appropriate for you is life imprisonment,” Popovic shook his head in denial, displaying anger, hatred, and many things more that I don’t know how to describe. Even though I had had the assumption that this guy must be a bastard, I still felt shocked when I saw this. Not shocked at his expression, but at how I felt about it. He did not think he did anything wrong, and I started to doubt my judgment that what he did was purely evil. The doubt only deepens after I actually dug into this case and learned more about the background of the conflict in former Yugoslavia.

The Srebrenica massacre was committed by Serbs against Muslims, but the killings among them and Croats, Albanians, and many more people date way back into history when the Ottoman Empire was still strong. Most of the time these groups of people live together well, but those killings in the past are just buried in the collective memory and never forgotten. When there was a sense of insecurity due to the collapse of economy in the early 90s, some simple political incitement by people like Milosevic would easily remind the Serbs of everything which happened in the past. In Serbian culture, there is a concept called blood vengeance: when someone kills your family member, you have to kill his or her family member before the deceased can rest in peace.

As to Popovic himself, and other defendants, it is easy for us to think of them as bloodless butchers who killed 8,000 people in Srebrenica. However, the killings are only part of the story in the 1,000-page trial judgment. Actually, some of the defendants (all the defendants involved in this case were just middle-ranking officers, the highest among whom was a colonel) even tried to resist the order from the very top. So it’s again the issue that Jennifer raised above: do bad guys “deserve vigorous representation?” When I started my internship, I would hesitate to say yes. I still do now, but I would also hesitate to say who’s a bad guy and who’s not.

On the other hand, I still cannot persuade myself that I can represent any kind of client. When I was working in a big law firm in Taiwan, the firm represented an American TV manufacturer in a suit against the former workers in its factory in Taiwan. The manufacturer used all kinds of toxic solvents in TV production, and many workers thus got cancer. After learning this, the first thing it did was to withdraw all the assets from Taiwan. When the Taiwanese judicial system finally acted, there was about 100,000 USD left in its bank account, to compensate about 500 dying workers, one fourth of whom had died. I quit my job shortly after I was assigned the case then, and I am still not ready to represent it now. However, where to draw the line is becoming harder and harder for me.

-- WenweiLai - 24 Jun 2010