Newsletters

As Chair of the World Peace Through Law Section of the Washington State Bar Association for 3 terms, I'm proud to have lead and encouraged volunteers to re-energize our monthly speaker series, massively improve membership recruiting, and rework our periodicals into more frequent (yet less expensive) monthly bulletin. I found it very interesting to develop programs, such as our Year-End Roundup of Human Rights, in cooperation with numerous other law-related groups and diverse individuals from around the world.  Here's the newsletters I wrote in that time:

2005

2006

2007

2008

Year-End Reports

 

September (2006): Attorney Julia Bolz.  In 1998, Bolz left her partnership with Ryan, Swanson and Cleveland in Seattle to provide legal and policy development assistance in Africa, Central America and Central Asia.

Recently, Julia has worked to address the plight of Afghani girls who have long suffered under the Taliban's repressive policies toward women. Julia founded the Journey for Afghan Schools program to establish cultural ties between Afghanistan and U.S. schools. With Julia's leadership, and aided by donations from Seattle students, eight schools for girls have been constructed, and five restored, in Afghanistan.

October: Professor Joel Ngugi & Judge Patricia Paul.
They spoke on the relationship between International Law and the Rights of Indigenous People, based on their experience in  Kenya and on American reservations.

November: Attorney Phillip Ginsberg and Jen Marlow. He presented the law of genocide, followed by Jen on the facts about Darfur. You may have seen Jen's documentary "Darfur Diaries": http://www.darfurdiaries.org/

December: Year-End Roundup of Human Rights

January: A panel of American veterans (a JAG, a judge, and three grunts) discussed "What Is An Illegal Order?". The black-letter law is much simpler than the reality as experienced by the troops.

March: Professor Mary Patricia Treuthart. What's it like teaching law in Kosovo.

April: Attorney Matt Harris, Department of Peace legislation. See http://www.usip.gov and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Peace

May: Beth Rivin & Roslyn Solomon. Using international human rights law to improve health
systems from  South Africa to Tacoma.

June: Salvador Tinajero, Consul of Mexico.  Litigating in The Inter-American Human Rights System to improve human rights in Mexico http://www.cidh.oas.org

July: Participants in the UW Guatemala Project: "The Shifting Terrain of Human Rights in Contemporary Guatemala". This is a wholly remarkable project, which gives me hope for our new generation. http://students.washington.edu/uwgp

August: Professors Menhajuddin Hamed, Mohammad Haroon Mutasem, Wali Mohammad Naseh, Humayoun Rahimi of the law schools in Kabul and Mazur-e-Sharif. In town for the Asian Law Program ( http://www.law.washington.edu/AsianLaw/ ), they discussed juggling constitutional, religious and traditional law. For example, textual conflicts between their constitution's guarantee of equal rights for women (something, ahem, the US constitution lacks ...)  and gender differences defined by religion are usually less important in a village than the traditional culture, which is usually very sexist.  They also pointed out that "Islamic Law" differs from place to place; just as Christianity has a variety of sects, so does Islam. Many thing done in the name of Islam are actually matter of culture.  Difficult texts (such as the penalty for apostasy) are worked out differently by different scholars (Islam has no "Pope" running things) so there's quite a struggle going on over the hard parts. They explained that what Afghanistan needs is peace and education - a perfect system can wait until a good system is working.

Cost of the War in Iraq

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