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Have robes, will travelIn many parts of the world, justice is not being served – or even on the menu. Through avocats sans frontières Québec, our province’s lawyers are making a difference in some of the roughest legal terrain on earth. By Hélèna Katz |
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 [ 2006-12-01 ] |
Québec City union lawyer Dominique-Anne Roy was in Haiti, and stunned by what she was hearing from a man on the street. He was waxing nostalgic for the brutal dictatorships of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier. “At least we knew who to fear,” he explained. Roy met the man while leading an exploratory mission from July 9 to 23, 2006, on behalf of Avocats sans frontières Québec.
She co-founded the non-profit organization in 2002, along with lawyers Pierre Brun and Pascal Paradis, after meeting the president of ASF France. These associations are part of an international movement that began in 1992 with ASF Belgium (not to be confused with Lawyers Without Borders, Inc., which was born in the U.S. in 2000), and subsequently spread to other countries including France, Denmark and Sweden.
Its members volunteer their time to help lawyers in developing nations defend human rights. Project costs are covered by donations, fundraising activities and grants. Since ASFQ’s inception four years ago, it has grown to some 300 members. It has participated in 19 missions and been involved in projects in Colombia, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Haiti.
THE ROAD TO HAITI
CECI (the Centre canadien d’étude et de cooperation internationale) approached the Quebec association about helping Haitian human rights groups develop their abilities to deal with what remains of the justice system in the failed Caribbean state. “It’s a country whose situation is more and more precarious. The number of kidnappings is increasing,” Roy says. “But it’s a country that I love, because Haitians are extremely warm and very open to working together.”During her mission with colleague Réal Policar, she met a variety of people involved in Haiti’s justice system in order to better understand the situation and how ASFQ could help. They spoke with the justice minister, heads of the country’s police and penal systems, and workers from NGOs that promote and try to protect human rights. Each had a different take on the situation in Haiti. “The realities are different if you’re meeting the justice minister, the head of the police force, a human rights group or a women’s organization,” Roy recalls.
The ASFQ delegation learned that Haiti’s justice system is rife with problems. Some people are held for over a year while awaiting trial, despite the Haitian law that stipulates they be brought before a judge within 48 hours of being arrested. “So people end up serving sentences before going to trial,” Roy reports. “Sometimes the sentence they served is longer than the sentence they are given by a judge.”
Adults aren’t the only ones affected by long delays. Roy visited a prison for children, where all but one of the 85 young detainees were awaiting trial. “These are kids 10 and 12 years old, who’ve been waiting months and years to be tried,” she says. “When you see that, as a lawyer who has taken an oath, you have to do something.”
The Port-au-Prince Bar Association offers legal aid to people in financial need. Students-at-law are there to defend the accused at trial, but they can do nothing for detainees whose court date has not even been set. Haiti’s justice system is also dogged by overpopulated prisons and a lack of human rights training for justice workers. Despite the very real challenges, Roy has seen how keen Haitians are to improve the situation. “We are working with people who have had the courage to go the distance.”
In collaboration with CECI, ASFQ has initiated a two-year project to help teach human rights protection at the law school of Haiti’s state university, assist an NGO in developing proposals for legislative reform, and set up a legal aid program at a non-profit women’s group. “The goal is to implement practices that can serve as examples,” Roy explains.
She is inspired by the courage of the men and women who risk their lives to promote human rights in Haiti and by their perseverance in the face of setbacks. “You see people who have placed so much hope in the potential of legislative changes, even though they haven’t seen anything happen,” she says. “We’re lucky to practise in a [Canadian] system, as imperfect as it is, where freedoms and rights can be exercised.”
ASFQ co-founder Pierre Brun stresses that the organization’s role is to support and complement local organizations in the countries where they have projects. “We don’t impose the Canadian legal system and values,” he says. “Our involvement will always be based on the needs of local lawyers. They’re the ones who tell us what they need. We go down and show them how the system can work, and then give them the momentum to build it up,” says Brun. “It’s the principle of showing people how to fish.”
Would you ever work for a social or charitable enterprise in the third sector?