Vienna Colucci is Mangaing Director of AIUSA's Policy and Advocacy Unit. Vienna has been a member of AIUSA's staff since 1992. In that time, she has served as the Director of AIUSA's Program for International Justice and Accountability, which involved building grassroots support for the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the exercise of universal jurisdiction to hold perpetrators of human rights abuses accountable in domestic courts; and respect for fair trials and the rule of law in combating terrorism. She organized AIUSA's campaign for U.S. signature of the ICC treaty, and researched and helped to draft AIUSA's USA: Safe Haven for Torturers report. Prior to that, Vienna was Director of AIUSA’s Membership Networks Program, responsible for advocacy, training and outreach related to the legal protection of human rights, health and human rights, children's rights, and religion and human rights. Vienna has served on AIUSA's crisis teams formed in response to the attacks of September 11 and the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Sudan, Israel and the Occupied Territories. She has for a number of years been involved in AIUSA’s Committee on Mission, Research and Action, which educates and advises members and staff about policy issues of concern to the AI movement, and chaired the interdepartmental staff working group responsible for building movement capacity to campaign on economic, social and cultural rights.
I’ve had the privilege of viewing and commenting on various stages of the film as it was being developed. It’s a great piece of work. With each viewing, something new strikes me. I wanted to share with you some of the themes in the film that resonate with me today.
First, The Reckoning builds to what feels like a “Law and Order: War Crimes”- style finale, with the Prosecutor and his team closing in on a target – a sitting head of state — considered by many to be out of reach. The crime thriller analogy is actually very appropriate, because some of the footage we see in the film is, when you think about it, crime scene footage. It’s easy to forget that. Mass rapes, murders, mutilations and starvation are often treated as the tragic and inevitable consequences of war, instead of as crimes which are planned — which actually require planning to implement on a mass scale — and for which specific individuals are responsible and can be held accountable.
Secondly, The Reckoning is very much a ”David and Goliath” story. Critics of the ICC’s work try to portray the Court as a big, Western-dominated bully out to get Africa. I think you will come away from The Reckoning struck by how small the Prosecutor’s team really is in comparison with the massive crimes they are confronting. I think you will also be struck by how relentless they are in pursuing justice for the victims, who they stress are the millions of Africans subjected to human rights abuses, instead of the few who try to obscure their culpability by hiding behind the mantle of nationalism.
Finally, The Reckoning tells the story of what is essentially an unfinished revolution. The film explores both the breakthroughs in the advancement of human rights and the rule of law that made the ICC possible, as well as the lack of political to make enforcement a reality. Former Nuremberg prosecutor (and one of my heroes) Benjamin Ferencz recalls how the entire body of human rights law that we take for granted today came to be in his lifetime, demonstrating how much is possible in what is essentially a blink of the eye in historical time. Yet most of the world’s governments – some of whose representatives we see celebrating the ICC treaty at the start of the film — continue to fail to give any meaningful support the ICC in apprehending indicted war criminals. We may still have a long way to go, but it’s possible to get there.
A few years ago, thanks to a grant from the former JEHT Foundation, I began working with the great Skylight Pictures on a short documentary film for Amnesty members. The film was envisioned as a tool to help our members better understand international justice through the stories of the survivors and human rights defenders who are pursuing such cases.
Thanks to their work on the internationally acclaimed State of Fear, Skylight had developed strong relationships with families and activists in Peru involved in the case against former President Alberto Fujimori, and so suggested that we feature the campaign to bring Fujimori to justice as one of the film’s three story segments.
I was hesitant at first: I wanted “hot”, current stories, and Fujimori’s then still-alleged crimes were well over a decade old. His wasn’t “technically” an international justice case because Peru wanted to prosecute. And the case didn’t appear to be making much headway, with Fujimori traveling from one country to the other apparently unfazed by the warrant Interpol issued for his arrest. But director Pam and editor Peter prevailed, and when I saw the rough cut of the segment they created on Fujimori, I knew why.
The segment follows Gisela Ortiz and Raída Condór, whose brother and son, respectively, were among the students disappeared from La Cantuta University in 1992 and later killed by a paramilitary group operating under Fujimori’s effective command. Gisela and Raida, still devastated and still so angry after some fifteen years, never stopped demanding answers about what happened to their loved ones. They were relentless about exposing Fujimori as a murderer who had masqueraded as a head of state. When he moved to Chile from where he had been living in exile in Japan, Gisela traveled to Chile and demonstrated outside his house, demanding to know why the police where hassling the protesters instead of the suspect inside.
When Chile’s Supreme Court decided that Fujimori could be extradited back to Peru for trial, Gisela sent a note that read “I believe that this is a victory for the whole world, recognizing that human rights abusers have little room to hide, and wherever they are, justice much reach them to restore dignity to the victims.”
Today is Gisela’s and Raida’s day, because, in the end, justice is not about the perpetrators of abuses, but about the victims and the survivors. It’s such an important lesson that we need to keep learning over and over again, and so relevant today.
When, for example, we hear Sudan’s indicted president al-Bashir and his allies accuse the International Criminal Court of being anti-African, as though he is somehow more African or more important an African than the millions of Darfuris who have suffered because of his actions. In Darfur, as in Peru, as in so many other places where grave abuses have been committed, we sometimes have to work to hear the voices of the victims above the spin of the perpetrators and the powerful and compilict allies who would like nothing better than to wait us out until we move on to the next story and let them off the hook. We need to wait them out instead, just as Gisela and Raida did.
Today is twenthieth anniversary of the first World AIDS Day, established to commemorate those who have died of the disease and marshal attention to address the epidemic. The World AIDS Campaign has declared “Lead-Empower-Deliver“ to be the theme for this year.
For the last several years, AI has been zeroing in on the message that AIDS is a human rights issue. Human rights abuses place people at greater risk of contracting HIV, and, all too often, those living with HIV and AIDS are subjected to human rights abuses.
Nowhere is the link between human rights abuses and HIV and AIDS clearer than in South Africa, where women, particularly those living in rural areas, face not only high HIV prevalence and high levels of sexual violence, but also widespread poverty. AI’s report, I am at the lowest end of all, draws on the stories of women who, having contracted HIV as a result of violence, must now overcome extreme poverty and disrcimination in order to obtain treatement.
Yesterday someone emailed me a link to a mock NYT article, National Health Insurance Act Passes. I’m embarrassed to confess: I fell for it, hook, line and sinker. I believe that universal health care is one of the most important issues of our time, so, for a minute, as I read the first few paragraphs, I was elated. And then I noticed the date: July 4, 2009.
The United States National Health Insurance Act really does exist. Representative John Conyers first introduced the bill (H.R. 676) in 2003. Today there are 93 cosponsors. The bill would create a publicly financed, privately delivered health care system for all, essentially expanding the U.S. Medicare program. It would be what is described as a “single payer” system.
Polls show that some sixty-four percent of Americans want the U.S. to adopt universal health insurance. Fifty-four percent support a single payer system, as do 6 in 10 physicians. President-elect Obama has said that he would consider a single payer health care system if he were designing a system from scratch.
So why does the idea of “Medicare for all” seem so far-fetched? Is it really on “that’ll never happen” par with Donald Rumsfeld tearfully admitting on ”The View” that ”the whole torture thing wasn’t such a good idea” (as reported in another mock NYT article)?
Are we intimidated by the prospect of confronting a powerful insurance lobby? Is the stumbling block the “socialized medicine” label that opponents are quick to throw around?
I’ll confess one other thing: the article left me feeling energized in a surprising way. For a moment, I felt what it would be like to learn that Congress had taken a genuinely groundbreaking step to ensure that no one falls between the cracks. That the right to health care would finally be something people enjoy and not just hear about in debates. That 18,000 people wouldn’t die that year because they couldn’t afford care. That hundreds of billions of dollars wouldn’t be diverted from health care to administration while policymakers talk about having to make hard choices about who can be covered. And that hundreds of thousands of people wouldn’t be forced into bankruptcy or homelessness by crushing medical bills.
So what do you think? Can we make universal healthcare a reality in the United States?
Learn more about what activists in the U.S. are doing to bring about universal healthcare:
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Sarnata Reynolds is the Refugee Program Director at Amnesty International USA where she promotes the enforcement of international human rights standards pertaining to refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants. See all »
