SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY
Law professor has leading role in mock trial
She will prosecute Sudan‘s president for genocide
Jim Doyle, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, November 10, 2006
Beth Van Schaak served as a plaintiffs’ trial counsel in a landmark human rights case against two Salvadoran generals found guilty of torture. Her work has also involved prosecuting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and tracking the atrocities of Cambodia‘s Khmer Rouge.
Now the assistant professor at Santa Clara University‘s School of Law is preparing for a high-profile trial of a different sort: She will be a prosecuting attorney next week in a mock trial against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for genocide and crimes against humanity.
The one-day trial comes as a prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in the Hague is investigating al-Bashir and dozens of his associates for their alleged involvement in similar crimes.
The mock tribunal — "Judgment on Genocide: The International Citizens Tribunal for Sudan" — is scheduled to take place Monday at the United Methodist-owned Church Center for the United Nations, which is across the street from the U.N. headquarters in New York City.
While al-Bashir is not expected to show up at the proceedings and the verdict will not carry the force of law, the event is designed as a public forum in which the alleged mastermind behind Sudan‘s genocide is put in focus.
"I’ve been tracking the crime of genocide. I’ve been a human rights activist for a long time," said Van Schaak, 37, a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School. "I thought this was an important endeavor to keep the issue of Darfur at the foreground and provoke a response from the international community so that it doesn’t take a wait-and-see attitude. It merits attention and some kind of immediate intervention."
The tribunal’s project director and the mock trial director are also Bay Area human rights activists.
The proceedings — which will be Webcast at www.judgmentongenocide.org will have the elements of a regular trial, including defense lawyers. Survivors of genocide, including Sudanese refugees, will present eyewitness testimony, along with humanitarian workers and researchers. A panel of judges will include several human rights experts and Nigerian author Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. The government of Sudan has been invited to present its defense.
"The trial will show that the genocide in Darfur is not an aberration, but a consistent pattern of abuse used by the al-Bashir regime, to further its goal of ‘Arabizing’ Sudan," said trial director Elvir Camdzic, a San Francisco-based human rights activist and survivor of the Bosnian genocide. "Our goal is to educate the public in further detail of the decades-long crimes of the Sudanese government against their own citizens."
In September, Van Schaak and her co-counsel, David Kilgour, a former member of the Canadian House of Commons, drafted — with the aid of other scholars, law professors and foreign policy experts — an indictment against the Sudanese military regime, which seized power in a 1989 coup.
The 19-page indictment charges al-Bashir and his associates of engaging in a "joint criminal enterprise" in carrying out acts of genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws of war against Sudan’s civilian population, including widespread and systematic murders; deportations and forcible transfers of entire communities; enslavement; torture; rape; persecution; and destroying civilian property without military need.
Some of these abuses are the subject of an investigation of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which is examining the alleged complicity of 51 Sudanese officials in Darfur‘s genocide.
The tribunal’s 15-count indictment contends that al-Bashir exercises command and control over Sudan’s military forces and armed militias such as the Janjaweed, a roving militia that is blamed for the massacre, rape, and forced displacement of minority tribal and civilian groups in Darfur and other areas of Sudan.
"The Janjaweed have worked in close coordination with Sudanese land and air forces to empty, plunder and destroy more than 1,000 villages in north and south Darfur," the tribunal’s indictment states.
Van Schaak, who lives in Mountain View, served as a law clerk for the office of the prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. She is the former acting executive director of the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco, a nonprofit law firm that represents victims of human rights abuses. She has also served as legal adviser at the Documentation Center for Cambodia, a Phnom Penh organization that tracks crimes and atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. She previously practiced law with Morrison & Foerster in Palo Alto.
In 2002, Van Schaak was a trial counsel on a landmark case in which a federal jury in Florida awarded a $54.6 million verdict to three Salvadoran torture survivors — a doctor, a professor and a lay church worker — against two former Salvadoran generals who had retired in Florida.
Sponsors of the mock tribunal on Sudan include human rights organizations such as the Darfur Alert Coalition, Genocide Watch and the San Francisco Bay Area Darfur Coalition. They have pressed for the immediate deployment of a U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur. Al-Bashir has declared that he will never allow a U.N. force in Sudan.
"The tribunal is interested in saving lives of innocent civilians by telling the truth about President Bashir’s brutal management of the genocide in Darfur," said project director Tim Nonn of Petaluma, who holds a doctorate in Christian ethics. "It will demonstrate the need for immediate international action as well as the absurdity of waiting for approval of U.N. peacekeepers by the Sudanese government – which is itself the very architect of this genocide."
To watch the Webcast of Monday’s tribunal, go to www.judgmentongenocide.org and click "Watch the Trial."
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/11/10/BAGF7MA0PH1.DTL
