Day 63: Nyanza

Greetings from Nyanza, Rwanda.

Our time here at the Institute of Legal Practice and Development (ILPD) is winding down and Jesse and I are putting the final touches on the benchbook we compiled on gender-based violence. We have spent the last nine weeks interviewing experts and professionals in the legal community in Rwanda and researching gender-based violence in general. Last Wednesday we presented a draft of our work to the Deputy Chief Justice of the Republic of Rwanda, and our impression was that he was pleased with our findings and encouraged by the future prospect of using benchbooks in Rwanda. The Deputy Chief Justice said that he expects Rwandan judges to benefit from having a practical resource to use during trials, in particular for recent graduates entering the judiciary.

Institute of Legal Practice and Development in Nyanza, Rwanda

Graduating law students in Rwanda choose to become prosecutors, defense attorneys, or judges directly out of law school. This process will help Rwanda replenish the judiciary that was decimated during the genocide, but also places recent graduates with little or no experience in court to hear and decide cases. The ILPD aims to strengthen the justice sector in Rwanda and does so by providing practical legal training for judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys from all levels of experience. The goal of our project (initially chosen as a pilot to test whether Rwanda should introduce benchbooks), will hopefully further the Institute’s goal and further strengthen the effectiveness of the judiciary. In addition, if our project proves useful, the ILPD may produce additional benchbooks, which will allow the Institute to reach more students than the current 38 seats the ILPD handles per intake class.

Our time here at the ILPD has been great and we have made many new friends among the students. In conversation with the students we regularly talk about how law promotes development and it is exciting to think about Rwanda’s future as more trained judges and lawyers enter the workforce here. Throughout our interviews we regularly heard that the shortage of judges and prosecutors are contributing to the rise in overcrowded prisons, since pre-trial detentions can last for several years as prosecutors build cases against the accused. Instituting mechanisms such as benchbooks will hopefully ease some of this and other burdens on the legal system by helping judges hear and decide cases more efficiently.

Hillside in Kigali

Aside from research and writing the benchbook, Jesse and I have enjoyed trips to various places in Rwanda and Burundi over the weekends. A clear highlight of the trip was visiting the mountain gorillas in the north-western mountain region of Rwanda. We also took trips to the beautiful Lake Kivu, which forms the western border of Rwanda, and to Bujumbura on Lake Tanganyika in Burundi. A personal highlight for me was being stuck on the side of the road for a few hours after the bus I was taking from Lake Kivu back to Kigali broke down. Generally, this sort of thing can ruin a day and erase the relaxation felt after a morning of swimming and sunning by a lake. Fortunately for me, we happened to breakdown 100 meters or so from where a children’s church group was practicing and I ended up enjoying a private concert of singing and traditional dance as I waited for a bus to pick us up.

Overlooking Lake Kivu

All in all, I will be sad to leave, but happy knowing that good things are happening in the justice sector in Rwanda's. We met with many good people dedicated to improving the rule of law with the goal of promoting development, which will allow residents and tourists alike to enjoy the rich natural beauty here. If you have a chance to visit, I recommend that you do.

Silverback gorilla

DAY ONE: ASOCHIVIDA

DAY ONE: ASOCHIVIDA

On the morning of July 6th 2009, we met several staff members of New Haven Leon Sister City Project (NHLSCP) to discuss the logistics of a project it has just begun working on with the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL): CIEL is representing several communities from the districts of Chinandega and Leon in an International Finance Committee (IFC) dispute resolution proceeding against the Nicaraguan Sugar Estates Limited (NSEL).

After a brief meeting in NHLSCP’s office, the five of us loaded into the back of a pick up truck and headed to the town of Chichigalpa to meet with ASOCHIVIDA, an association of former NSEL employees who NSEL terminated after a company doctor diagnosed them with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD).

When we arrived at ASHOCHIVIDA’s headquarters shortly before 11am, the summer heat was already unbearable. The thick, humid air stifled our breathing and transformed our outfits into sweat rags. As I stepped down from the truck, I surveyed my surroundings: ASOCHIVIDA’s office consisted of a huge dirt lot with one large tree. It lacked a latrine, garbage can, electricity, or running water. ASHOCHIVIDA had erected two large, open-air, black tents which offered its members some relief from the sun and rain. The office contains several plastic chairs, three hammocks, one table and an unobstructed view of Ingenio San Antonio’s security gate, one of NSEL’s sugar plantations where all the male members of ASOCHIVIDA used to work.

As we stepped down from the truck, Eziquel – the President of ASOCHIVIDA – greeted us with a warm smile and a firm handshake. A dozen members of ASOCHVIDA gathered behind their President. Unlike Eziquel, however, their eyes and body language delivered a different message: suspicion, skepticism, fear, anger, and fatigue. After briefly introducing ourselves, Eziquel provided us with a detailed history of ASOCHIVIDA’s battle for NSEL recognition:

“We are sick and dying” he proclaimed. “We gave them everything and this is how they have repaid us for our service. We are not asking for much, food to feed our families, access to doctors and medicine to help us fight off death, an alternative form of employment so that we can provide for our families. Though we fear death, there is nothing more humiliating and disheartening, then not being able to support our families. Thousands of people just like us are already dead and thousands more are in the process of dying, and for what? They are already the richest family in Nicaragua.”

As the poignancy of his words soaked into our minds, the magnitude of the situation we had just walked into became instantly apparent.

Eziquel took us on a tour of one of the neighborhoods, just outside the Ingenio. To the unsuspecting eye, the community looked no different than your typical Nicaraguan neighborhood.

“What’s missing?” Eziquel asked us.

We looked around but before we were able to venture a guess, he answered his own question.

“The men! They’re a dying breed here. And they’re dying off faster than ever before. Men use to work twenty or thirty years before getting sick. Today, one is lucky to last ten.”

We drove past a large group of young men walking, machetes in hand, to cut sugar cane at the Ingenio. The young men, excited by our presence, directed a series of compliments to the female members of our delegation. “Hola chelas! We love you!” the chavallos yelled, using the Nicaraguan slang for gringas. They laughed and smiled brightly; they looked happy, healthy.

“Most of them will be dead in ten years” Eziquel chimmed in. “The weakest of them won’t last five . . . The company has begun to hire our women to cut,” he added. “What does that tell you?”

The answer I was afraid was not that NSEL was striving to become more gender inclusive in its hiring practices.

When we returned to ASHOCHIVIDA’s headquarters, we introduced ourselves to several members of the association. In the midst of our small talk, a tall, gaunt man stepped forward from the crowd and in a calm, direct voice posited to us the question/challenge that would change the entire nature of our delegation.

¨What are you planning to do here?” he began. “We have seen groups like yours before. They come here with cameras, pens, and notebooks, asking us many questions; we share our stories, our pains, our fears. They express their empathy and desire to help. They will go home and inform others; they will be outraged they say.

And, then they leave; most never return. And, what do we have to show for it?” he asks. “Perhaps the people in your countries are angry about what is happening to us, but we are dying. Today! Please forgive me, but I am skeptical. I want to know what makes your group any different¨?

It goes without saying that we were not prepared to adequately respond to the man’s question. We certainly did not reveal to him that our plan for the three weeks was to conduct interviews and gather enough pertinent research information about NSEL, CKD, sugar cane, and the IFC’s loan to NSEL to write up a detailed report or two next semester at school.

Though we are a socially conscious delegation, in my opinion, we had totally failed to consider the impact our field research might have on the human beings whose lives we were asking to enter, the group for whom the stakes and implications of our human rights inquiries were real. They were dying now and they were tired of the whole song and dance routine performed by intellectually curious, well-intentioned foreigners whose articles, films, and projects ASOCHIVIDA never saw nor directly felt the benefits from.

When we left ASOCHIVIDA’s headquarters that afternoon we knew one thing with certainty: we were not going to spend our short time with ASOCHIVIDA gathering information for our personal projects. Our delegation would instead work directly with ASOCHIVIDA to design and implement a community development agenda that they wanted, the benefits from which they would feel, beginning bright and early the following morning.

We Left our Hearts in Managua

Our time in Nicaragua’s capital city of Managua recently came to a close, and we have started our new work in Leon. While the work in Leon is exciting, difficult and exhilarating, the three of us are nonetheless missing the four girls at the Nicoya Mission orphanage who stole our hearts.

The three weeks we spent in Managua was centered upon researching the Nicaraguan system for dealing with children victimized by sexual abuse. In the entire country, there is only one orphanage that solely treats children who have been sexually abused; all other orphanages mix such victims with other children. Nicoya Mission, a private organization funded strictly by donations, provides the four girls living there with a psychologist three days a week, alongside an extensively trained staff and an around-the-clock security guard.

While we spent our mornings meeting with professionals in the field of youth services, our afternoons were dedicated to Ligia, Francisca, Damaris, and Jaqueline. Jenny had the wonderful idea that we write and perform a play with the girls. Our first day at Nicoya, we gathered the girls to discuss different ideas for the play. All four of them were so timid; we could barely get a word out of them! Eventually, we formulated the play’s plot, which was about a bear, a tiger, a shark and a crocodile who go on an adventure in search of “El Campo Magico,” a fabled field where everyone in the animal kingdom can play baseball together, where it never rains, where bats and gloves grow from trees, and where a river endlessly brings water to all who are thirsty.

The girls were apprehensive at first, but after a few exercises to introduce theater, they started to get really into the play. We convinced the security guard to draw the sets for us, which the girls painted. We made paper mache flowers and mushrooms, and we put together some killer costumes. Before we knew it, the big day was upon us. It was unbelievable how nervous the three of us were! We managed to gather an audience of about twenty people, and suddenly the curtain was drawn, and the girls were on. I have never been so impressed in my entire life! The girls hit every line spot on, their blocking was perfect, and their voices carried far and beyond our expectations! I cried the entire play. It was absolutely beautiful. At the end, the girls had transformed from four nervous, shy adolescents into outgoing, proud young women.

We were covered in tears when we parted ways on Sunday, but the three of us know that our work with the girls at Nicoya Mission has only just begun, and there will be much more of it in the time to come.

HIV/AIDS Legal Centre in Sydney, Australia

Kangaroos, Koalas, and Vegemite.

Any child learns to associate these strange things with the country of Australia from an early age. Australia owes both its diverse animal life and unique history to its isolation and geographic remoteness. This isolation has also had an impact on Australia’s history with HIV and the AIDS epidemic.

Australia’s first recorded death from AIDS occurred in 1983, 2 years after the Centers for Disease Control began to identify the disease. Australia reacted rapidly to the disease with dramatic public education ads such as this famous one from 1987.

Due to education and prevention, Australia has experienced a relatively low rate of HIV infection, even though it has been rising in recent years. The usefulness of education and prevention end once a person actually acquires the virus and a whole range of new problems arise.

One of these problems is HIV and its relation to Law. People living with HIV often find themselves in a difficult and often unclear legal problem, which is only compounded by their positive status. The HIV/AIDS Legal Centre (HALC) in Sydney, where I am volunteering this summer, aims to help HIV+ people navigate their legal rights and responsibilities.

Disclosure of one’s HIV status is one of the most important areas of law for people living with HIV. Who must I disclose to? Do I have to disclose my status at all? What if my employer asks if I’m HIV+? What if my insurance company does?

These are all difficult legal questions, too complex to get into in this blog post, but in general, under New South Wales law, if you are HIV+ you are legally required to disclose your HIV status to a person before you have sex with them, whether it is vaginal, anal, or oral sex. For more on disclosure of HIV, see HALC's guide on it here.

Parliament House in Canberra, the capital of Australia. The source of all Commonwealth (Federal) law in Australia.

Another difficult area is the right to privacy. Currently there are no laws protecting an HIV+ person’s right to privacy in Australia. If an ex-partner or neighbor knows your HIV status, they can spread that information to anyone they wish. Those with HIV are left with little recourse since libel and slander laws would not apply if the information is true.

Insurance is complicated and tricky to most people, but to those living with HIV, insurance becomes even more complicated. If one discloses their HIV status to an insurance company, more often than not, they will be denied coverage. If one does not disclose, if an accident happens, the insurance company may try to get out of paying because their disclosure policy was not followed, even if the injury is unrelated to the person’s HIV. While anti-discrimination legislation exists, proving that a decision was made purely because of a person’s HIV status is difficult to prove.

Most appalling of all though is New South Wales’ policy regarding autopsies of HIV+ bodies. If an autopsy, the body will not be reconstructed if it is HIV+. Instead, the body will be returned in a couple body bags, denying a grieving family the possibility of an open casket funeral and a final goodbye to their loved one. Upon inquiry of why their loved one will not be reconstructed, many families learn for the first time that a loved one was living with HIV. This disclosure by the Department of Health can cause a family addition stress and grief, not to mention possible rumors and ill treatment in their community.

In June, HALC launched a publication titled "Criminal Transmission of HIV: A Guide for Legal Practitioners in NSW." Criminal transmission of HIV is a murky area of the law as the guide illustrates by citing relevant caselaw in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK. The guide covers topics ranging from what type of offense is criminal transmission of HIV (is it grievous bodily harm or its own crime?) to defenses and their impact on questions of policy. The entire guide can be views in PDF format here. The launch was attended by many including Justice Bell, a Justice to Australia's High Court (their Federal Supreme Court).

While there are many similarities between HIV in Australia and the US, one of the first differences I noticed was the prevalence and availability of PEP. PEP, short for Post-Exposure Prophylaxis, is a regime of anti-retroviral drugs which can be taken if someone has engaged in a high risk activity (such as unsafe sex or sharing needles) and believes they may have been exposed to HIV. While the drugs do not guarantee that one will not contract HIV, there are encouraging signs that PEP does significantly reduce the risk of becoming HIV+. In the US, PEP is primarily used for health care workers who may accidentally stick themselves with a needle while working, while in Australia, PEP is widely known and available to the general public at low to no cost.

No blog post about Sydney would be complete without a view of beautiful Sydney Harbor and the Sydney Opera House. This is the daily view of the giraffes in Taronga Zoo on Sydney's North Shore. Not a bad view for a caged animal...

Overall, I have had a fantastic summer while volunteering at HALC. I have learned much about the legal problems that those living with HIV experience as well as the skills and knowledge to navigate another country’s system of law. I look forward to learning more about HIV legal problems in the US and comparing them to those I witnessed while in Australia.