By Gideon Daley
A man sits in his room in Bosnia, playing the trumpet while trying to forget the stories of rape, murder, and torture he listened to all day.
This man is Phillip L. Weiner, a Massachusetts prosecutor turned international prosecutor and then international judge. Weiner recently gave a lecture at Stonehill College, which was sponsored by the Martin Institute of Law and Society, where he talked about his efforts to aid developing and war-torn countries develop fair legal systems.
Before he began training legal staff across the world, Weiner prosecuted war criminals involved in the Bosnian Genocide of the 1990s. He then became an international judge and oversaw the trials of more war criminals from the Yugoslavian conflicts at the Hague, and then went to Cambodia to judge defendants of the Cambodian Genocide in the 1970s when the dictator Pol Pot led the nation.
“Cultures, traditions, and corruption,” Weiner said when describing the main issues these nations faced in developing fair legal systems.
He said a friend of his in the legal world, for example, once had a Pakistani police officer ask why their investigative procedures did not involve beatings and torture.
Weiner said that many law students in the Balkans, the European region where Bosnia is in, were forced to buy their grades, get politicians to boost their grades, or sleep with their professors to achieve success. Politicians would also interfere in judicial affairs by hiring their own judges, or using media outlets to slander judges that opposed them.
“If the public loses faith in the system, then it’s on its way to the collapse of the whole country,” Weiner said when describing the way corruption destroyed public faith in legal efforts. He described how the courts needed even more training to make their decisions completely transparent and understandable to the public in order to ensure the public could trust them and ignore any politicians’ slander.
“Training is occasional and limited,” Weiner said about the problems with training legal staff.
Oftentimes, trainers had just graduated from law programs in nations where it’s an undergraduate degree, or knew little about the nation they were training people from and just wanted to visit the place. Textbooks were also an issue, as oftentimes there were either no legal books in the nation’s language or the vast majority of trainees were illiterate, he said.
One of Weiner’s more successful efforts was a course he started which taught lawyers and judges to write clear and transparent legal documents, a skill not often taught in foreign law schools. Weiner’s program faced numerous challenges, but it was ultimately one of his most successful and popular programs abroad.
“I spent so much time training older judges and attorneys when I should have gotten the next generation ready,” Weiner said when thinking about what he would have done differently.
The older generations were too set in their ways to change, but those who were younger were more receptive to change, he said.
Weiner described his job as arduous, and as a prosecutor, he once worked 38 days, often well into the night.
“When you’re dealing with war crimes, the fact is often stranger than fiction,” Weiner said.
As a judge, he would often listen to stories of rape, murder, and genocide for up to seven hours a day, and he had only a small amount of time to play the trumpet and take walks at the end of the day to clear his head.
The lecture was on Monday, September 13 around noontime, and roughly 60 people, mainly members of the local community and a small number of Stonehill students attended the hour-long talk.
Sandra Hunnicut, a resident of Norton and a Stonehill alumnus, said the Martin Institute talks, which she often attended, are “a wonderful opportunity you can’t take advantage of.”
Sandra Karp of Norton had also attended other Martin Institute talks. “I just think they’re for the most part very informative,” she said.
Michael Huging, a Stonehill student from Switzerland, attended the talk for a class.
“I was interested to see American prosecutors being there,” Huging said, as he only knew about the crisis in Bosnia from a European perspective.
Weiner served as a prosecutor in Massachusetts from 1980 to 2000 and has worked internationally since 2000, though he has also occasionally been a visiting professor of criminal law at Boston College Law School.
Weiner encouraged attendees to focus on how they could help promote human rights internationally. “You don’t need to be a lawyer to assist a developing country,” Weiner said.
Comments