| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Brenda Hollis Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 7 of 8
What are the challenges for the future with regard to this implementation of humanitarian law? You talked about this at a luncheon seminar. Tell us a little about those issues that are on the table.
We can look at the challenges in two different ways. One challenge would be for the international community to do what it takes to make the International Tribunal successful, and that is to bring to the tribunals those people that have been indicted, to put pressure on the countries to turn them over, to take action against the countries if they don't, and to give adequate resources to the tribunal to carry out their mandates. To me, that's an important part of the overall solution; but I'm not sure it's the major part of the overall solution. Because even if these tribunals are 100% successful, they will never try the tens of thousands of perpetrators that remain in these countries.
Until these countries can move forward under the rule of law, instead of falling back into individual or group revenge for wrongs that have been done to members of the group, the international community has to come up with a way to deal with these other perpetrators, to give them fair trials, to protect the witnesses, and to ensure that the evidence that they give is not just dismissed, or is not just accepted without being reviewed, and to bring accountability to all of these people. And I don't know if that would be done in a criminal justice arena. I think for people who have been responsible for violence, it would have to be that.
Maybe those who passively stood by, who weren't in positions of authority, but passively stood by and didn't intervene, maybe a truth commission would help for them. But whatever the solution, I think it needs to be soon, sooner rather than later, and I think it has to be a solution that the people of those countries will accept as justice being done and justice being seen to be done. To me, that's the greatest challenge that the international community has. It's a human challenge, because I think all of us as individuals, if we are wronged, we want that wrong to be righted, we want accountability for that wrong.
There must be in all of this a Herculean task of communication. Tell us a little about that, the enormous effort of making everyone understand what the issue is, making everyone understand and transmitting what the evidence is, and on and on. Tell us a little bit about those complications and the way out, so to speak, in that regard.
Well, certainly, you and I are both native English speakers, and yet I daresay that if we were to communicate over a prolonged period about very serious matters, we would not communicate 100% effectively. If we go into the international environment, where you have official languages for the tribunal, which are English and French -- now, those may be the first language for some of the people, they are not for many of the people that work in the tribunal. So working within the tribunal structure itself to effectively communicate when you have to deal in a language that's not your first language adds another layer of difficulty.
In the Yugoslav Tribunal, as I said, English and French are the official languages, but for most of the victims and the survivors, their language is either Bosnian or Croatian or Serbian, so we have to work through interpreters. In Rwanda, most of the victims and survivors speak Kinyarwanda; we have to work through interpreters. And no matter how skilled the interpreter is, you cannot translate word for word from one language into another. One interpreter may translate it a little bit differently than another. So that's yet another layer of difficulty that we have. Then you have a person that perhaps has given a statement that has gone through three different translations. Then it goes into court and it goes through three more. So you can't really compare what a person said before to what they said now, and look for any consistencies. A great many of those may have to do with the skills of the interpreter, or just the reality of the inability to translate word for word.
So effective communication becomes not just an art form, which it is when you're communicating in the same language, but a real task you have to set for yourself, even down to how quickly do you talk. I have a tendency to speak too quickly, and in the courtroom, I would hear -- we all wore headphones -- I would hear in my ear from the interpreters, "Slow down! Slow down!" Or I would get a note, "Slow down." Because if they would have to interpret what I'm saying, I have to speak slowly enough for them to be able to get it and interpret it. So it adds another dimension to all of your activities.
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