PROFESSOR GROOME CO-ORGANIZES TWO EVENTS FOCUSED ON GENOCIDE AND JUSTICE
November 2019 — Professor Dermot Groome has seen the personal, moral and legal implications of atrocity crimes firsthand. He led the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) prosecution of Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the Siege of Sarajevo and the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia. Groome worries too many young people are unaware of this history, and he wants to raise their awareness. He helped organize “Responding to Atrocity Crimes,” a symposium held at Dickinson Law in October 2019, and a public event including a screening of The Trial of Ratko Mladić—a documentary featuring Professor Groome, a panel featuring survivor stories from Bosnians who have settled into central Pennsylvania, and a reception featuring Bosnian food.
The symposium saluted the publishing of a new book, International Crimes: Law and Practice, Volume I: Genocide by Judge Guénaël Mettraux, who serves in the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague. For the past year and a half, several students at Dickinson Law have assisted Mettraux, a Dickinson Law affiliate faculty member, with research for the book.
Attendees at the event, including many Dickinson Law students and faculty, heard from internationally recognized legal experts as well as a Dickinson Law staff member who witnessed genocide as a child in Africa. “Informing ourselves about the atrocity crimes and our historical response to them are important if we are to prevent them in the future,” said Groome. “It is in our national interest to be concerned about atrocity crimes.”
Atrocity crimes encompass three categories of crimes: war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, a legal term coined after World War II to describe the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Groome noted genocide is “extremely difficult to prove” and can be hard to prosecute. He thinks it is critical, though, for students to learn about it. “We want to inform young people about the genocide in Bosnia and these issues generally. This is a part of recent history most young adults are not aware of,” said Groome.
The symposium included three main parts, combining research and personal reflection. Mettraux gave a talk on researching genocide, its role in law, and what he learned while writing the book.
“Guénaël has spent the last several years investigating every judgment and court decision addressing the crimes of genocide. He systematically and exhaustively reviewed the work of international and domestic courts,” said Dickinson Law Dean and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law Danielle M. Conway. “During the course of his work, Guénaël asked Dickinson Law for research assistance. For the last one and a half years, several students have worked closely with him to finalize the text and check all of the sources. We are proud of their contribution to the book.”
“I worked on Volume 1 during the summer of 2018, after my first year of law school,” said Sarah Zomaya, a third-year Dickinson Law student. “I completed a lot of work with the bibliography and footnotes, ensuring the citations were in the correct Oxford University Press form. I learned in detail about each element of genocide and how the law has been applied.”
Alumna Olivia Phillips, 2019, served as lead research assistant on the book, which meant editing, organizing, researching and formatting sources. She was taking Groome’s International Criminal Law class when he recommended her for the project in 2018. While she notes she was familiar with the current state of the law on genocide, “I did learn a lot about the origins of ‘genocide’ as a term and as a concept, and how the law on genocide has evolved since its inception,” she said.
Volume 2, currently at the publisher, focuses on crimes against humanity. “Through my work on Volume 2, I learned a lot more about how different crimes against humanity is within the different international tribunals and the impact those differences have on how the crime is prosecuted and the success of those prosecutions,” said Phillips.
The symposium also included a panel on the American experience dealing with atrocity crimes, led by James Finkel, the co-founder of the Atrocities Prevention Study Group of the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C. Another panel, led by Max du Plessis, S.C., who has appeared before the Constitutional Court of South Africa and the Supreme Court of Appeal, discussed the African experience addressing atrocity crimes. That panel also included Dickinson Law Associate Director of Development Cheryl Isaac.
Isaac grew up in Liberia during the First Liberian Civil War, where she witnessed the types of atrocities described at the symposium. Groome asked her to provide a personal view to add dimension to the academic arguments.
“I was honored to sit on the panel,” said Isaac, who came to the United States in 1996 when she was 15 years old. “Academics do such great work, but often they never get to hear the visceral perspective from people who benefited from that work.”
She described watching TV coverage of the tribunal for former Liberian President Charles Taylor, who was convicted of war crimes. “I remember thinking, yes, someone has heard and seen some of the things our people have gone through,” said Isaac.
“She was able to offer critiques from a perspective that I think at least one of our scholars hadn’t fully considered,” noted Groome. “Cheryl made the valid point that victims are expected to cooperate with domestic atrocity crime prosecutions in many countries in the United Nations who could prosecute them under the principle of universal jurisdiction, and is that practical to expect of them?”
Rachel Wilcove, a first-year law student and Dean’s Fellow, attended the symposium. She hopes to work for the International Criminal Court one day and found the symposium deepened her understanding of the challenges the ICC faces.
“The symposium was most effective at conveying the technical side of the international prosecutorial system. This is arguably a side that is overlooked, perhaps because it is not as compelling as listening to victims’ stories,” said Wilcove. “I walked away with a more profound understanding of the difficulties that arise from a legal standpoint.”
The symposium took place shortly before another event related to atrocity crimes held at Dickinson College. “Genocide, Justice, and Hope: How 400 Bosnian Families Became Neighbors in our Central PA Community” included a screening of “The Trial of Ratko Mladic,” a documentary about the Mladic trial featuring Groome that aired on PBS’s “Frontline” earlier this year.
“Following the screening, we heard from a panel of Bosnian genocide survivors, including my friend Almaden Sakic,” said Christos Loizou, a first-year law student and Dean’s Fellow. “At seven years old, he had to run for his life to evade gunfire. His parents sacrificed their lives for him and his siblings to escape the Bosnian War and bring them to the United States. As I listened to his personal survivor story, I began to emotionally understand that genocide is a crime against all of us.”
“The series of lectures surrounding the legal issues in prosecuting genocide was an invaluable learning experience and a great first exposure to this area of international law,” added Deborah Osborne, also a first-year law student and Dean’s Fellow. “It helped provide legal background for the incredible ‘Genocide, Justice, and Hope’ event.”
During the sold-out event, Groome asked everyone to hold up their fingers to indicate how many loved ones they lost to genocide. “There were quite a few Bosnians in the audience, maybe a third of the approximately 850 people who attended,” said Groome. “Many of them had to hold up two hands to have enough fingers to show how many people they lost. Everyone I talked to after the event said that was the most powerful moment.”
The Bosnian families cooked for and served attendees an array of ethnic dishes to show their gratitude to Carlisle. “The community has welcomed and supported them — several are doctors or lawyers, they work in local businesses and hospitals, many are supervisors at the area’s local warehouses,” said Groome.
Learning more about these neighbors, like hearing from Isaac, humanized an experience whose horror is difficult to grasp, whether you’re a law school student or co-worker to a Bosnian immigrant.
“You may have seen people and maybe knew they were immigrants, but to hear their stories and hear about the tragedies they dealt with, that’s an important experience,” said Groome.
“These are the kinds of impactful and unique experiences that make the Dickinson Law community an exceptional place to begin the study of law,” said Osborne.
Professor Dermot Groome is a Professor of Law and the Harvey A. Feldman Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Penn State Dickinson Law. Much of his teaching, scholarship, and service focus on emerging areas of human rights and international criminal law and draw upon his deep expertise and experiences. After starting his career in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office where he was a member of the Sex Crimes Unit and after working in Jamaica, W.I. on issues of community development, human rights, and children’s rights, Professor Groome worked in Cambodia. While in Cambodia, he served as a Legal Advisor to the International Human Rights Law Group, helped lead an investigation into a 1997 attack on peaceful protestors and drafted a report for the UN Security Council, helped the Cambodia Defender’s Project and Legal Aid of Cambodia investigate deaths in police custody, worked on issues related to the incarceration of children, and wrote a draft juvenile criminal procedure code. Professor Groome subsequently spent over 11 years as a senior war crimes prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He investigated and drafted the first genocide indictment against a sitting head of state, Slobodan Milošević, and was the Senior Trial Attorney for the Bosnia indictment. In total, Groome led the prosecution of five international criminal trials including the case against Ratko Mladić, who was convicted of genocide for the murder of over 7,000 men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. He led eight large complex international investigations of senior military, political, and police officials. Groome’s cases all included crimes of sexual violence against women, men, and children. He was instrumental in the development of Joint Criminal Enterprise, a theory of criminal responsibility often used to assess the culpability of senior officials for the crimes committed by their subordinates. Two documentaries have been made about Professor Groome’s cases: The Trial of Ratko Mladić (PBS/Frontline 2019) and Crimes Before the ICTY: Višegrad (UN TV 2017).
In 2014, Professor Groome was a member of a panel of experts that issued a report on the effectiveness of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The report included over 190 recommendations for improving the ICC.
Professor Groome draws upon this expertise. His scholarship includes chapters about human rights in books published by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, as well as articles published in U.S. law journals. He is the author of the Handbook of Human Rights Investigation (2nd ed. 2011), which the Humanitarian Law Center considers a “cornerstone text” in human rights and which Amnesty International has referred to as “an invaluable tool for those committed to documenting human rights abuses,” and which U.S. Aid translated into Arabic for human rights advocates in Iraq and Syria. Professor Groome’s current research agenda focuses on the Right to Truth and Right to Know, and how these rights should be expanded to allow the families of disappeared persons to access information in the possession of international organizations. Groome is also exploring changes to international law that would offer more protection for children during armed conflicts by preserving their civilian status vis-à-vis those who unlawfully conscript them.
In addition to teaching Criminal Law, International Criminal Law, and Human Rights, Groome oversees the International Justice Program, which offers Dickinson Law students an opportunity to pursue advanced international study and gain legal experience during a semester in The Hague working in one of the international courts. In 2017 and 2018, Groome, Professor of Law Gary S. Gildin, and Dickinson Law students developed a first-of-its-kind international trial advocacy program using courtrooms at the ICC. Professor Groome also advises governments and victims groups with matters pending before the ICC and international human rights bodies. He is the recipient of several awards, including the New York State Bar Association’s Elihu Root/Henry L. Stimpson Award for Public Service.