Law Schools

This Is What Happens When The Clooneys, Columbia Law School, The ABA, The UN, And Microsoft Work Together

Plus Amal Clooney throws shade at Skadden.

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Photo left to right: Lee C. Bollinger, George Clooney, Amal Clooney, Brad Smith. Photo by: Beatrice Moritz / Clooney Foundation for Justice

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the launch of TrialWatch, the global initiative by the Clooney Foundation for Justice, partnered with Columbia Law School, the American Bar Association, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Microsoft. TrialWatch is designed to monitor and bring transparency to trials around the world that are at risk for human rights violations — with a particular focus on “trials involving journalists, LGBTQ persons, women and girls, religious minorities, and human rights defenders.” As Amal Clooney noted in her opening remarks, “we monitor the fairness of elections, but not trials.” This project aims to change all that.

In their remarks, the Clooneys described how problematic regimes use courts to give their actions the veneer of legitimacy. George provided the audience a laundry list of all the terrible things that happen — legally— in El Salvador, Iran, Brunei to name just a few. I won’t lie, the list is awful. Amal picked up the thread of “sinister prosecutions” and, without naming the Biglaw firm, slammed Skadden for their work on a report justifying the prosecution of former Russian-aligned Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s political rivals.

Working with their partner, Microsoft, TrialWatch developed an app for trained monitors to document what happens in noteworthy trials. (Of interest, President of Microsoft Brad Smith said that he’s been in product reviews with Bill Gates and it is nothing compared to being in a product review with Amal Clooney.) TrialWatch’s release on the launch describes how they are using technology to increase transparency:

Our monitors do not need to be lawyers, as long as they have completed the training program that we have developed with the United Nations, based on international human rights standards. And in court they will use a custom app developed with Microsoft to enable them to capture all relevant data – including photographs, audio clips, notes and official documents – in one place. Once we have gathered this data, a legal expert will grade the trial, and whenever possible the report will be shared with legislators, diplomats, journalists and NGOs.

The goal is to then take the data and convert it into an index that grades the performance of courts in countries around the world:

Ranking states’ performance on an index can help incentivize those with a low ranking to change their behaviour, and it can put pressure on governments to stop supporting those who are falling short. Grading trials and indexing the results can also help to expose the corrupt individuals who should be subjected to human-rights-sanctions under ‘Magnitsky laws’ or similar regimes. The EU has, in the past, imposed sanctions on judges and prosecutors who have presided over unfair trials in places like Belarus and Iran, and the US recently sanctioned senior Turkish officials for the unfair detention of an American. But this should be happening in many more places.

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The launch event also included a panel discussion led by the New York Times’  Nicholas Kristof, with both Amal and George, Smith, ABA president Bob Carlson, Columbia University president Lee C. Bollinger, and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein. When Kristof asked George how the project’s index can be used to shame bad actors, George came back to a theme that he hit multiple times during the event, that those that do business with these governments are complicit in their acts and public pressure can be used to stop the flow of money into those countries. “You can shame banks,” George said. (I guess he hasn’t watched the Netflix documentary on HSBC.)

Carlson noted that the program has “unequivocally” had an impact already. And Smith said that TrialWatch will be a success when we don’t need it anymore, when the abuses stop happening.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the program, you can check it out here.

You can watch some footage from the event below.

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headshotKathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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