Wanted! African women lawyers

Although 100% of cases currently before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague involve crimes of gender based violence committed in Africa, only 4% of ICC lawyers are women from that continent. The ICC is hoping to change this with a campaign to recruit African women lawyers to represent both victims and defendants at the court.

By Hélène Michaud
“Most of the victims said: she understands us better because she’s a woman and a mother.”
Africa needs more lawyers like Carine Bapita.
It’s not that male lawyers can’t do it, she explains, but women who’ve been raped, especially in Africa, just don’t feel at ease telling their traumatic stories to men. “We know what it is to give birth, to struggle to raise children. I try to put myself at their place, and I understand.”
This ambitious Congolese lawyer is proud to have been the first woman ever to speak on behalf of victims of war crimes in the history of international criminal law. During that hearing in the trial of Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga before the ICC in 2006, she felt the weight of the responsibility she carried.
“I thought, so, it’s an African woman, it’s me! And I’m speaking to the whole world!”
African women make up only 4% of ICC lawyers
All cases currently before the ICC involve war crimes and crimes against humanity, including sexual violence, committed in Africa. The great majority of victims are women. Yet less than four percent of the 335 lawyers allowed by the court to represent victims are African women.
A “drop of water in the desert”, as ICC registrar Sylvana Arbia puts it.
The court this week launched a major campaign, along with the International Bar Association (IBA), to recruit female lawyers from Africa, in order to redress this imbalance.
How many victims kept silent?
One cannot but wonder just how many among the thousands of women who were victims of sexual crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic or in the Sudan kept silent because they had no women lawyers they could talk to, and were thus denied access to international justice and reparation.
“Many women told me that they wouldn’t have dared talk about it with a man,” says Hélène Cissé, a lawyer from Senegal who is also on the List of Counsel authorised to represent victims and defendants at the ICC. “Because they have been hurt in such an intimate part of their bodies, victims of rape cannot even imagine to talk about it to a man. So female lawyers are more effective than males to get information and evidence from women.”
“That is a reality that we should accept and then try to accommodate,” says Mark Ellis, the IBA´s executive director. The IBA will mobilise African bar associations in order to encourage female lawyers from Africa to put in applications at the ICC.
Dealing with emotions
Women lawyers dealing with traumatised victims say they need to find the right balance between their own sensitivity and their professional obligation to gather evidence. Bapita says, “I have emotions too, but I cannot allow them to take over.”
Cisse agrees:
“Some of the atrocities are so bad that sometimes you have nightmares, but after the nightmares you wake up and you say: we have to stand up to fight against this type of crime, we have to be stronger and control ourselves.”
There’s more they have to deal with: there's insecurity, stress, threats by militant groups, and the difficulty, in failed or weak states, to find official documents required by ICC magistrates.

But both feel strongly that women lawyers in Africa have the responsibility to relay the experiences of the victims of war crimes to the rest of the world. “The best way to do this is to represent them before the highest court in the world,” says Carine Bapita.
And people in the rest of the world, she stresses, need to be made aware that the arms that they manufacture are used to wage wars in Africa.
Why so few Bapitas and Cissés at the ICC?
Traditionally, female African lawyers have shunned criminal law, preferring family and commercial law. “Young law students are reproducing the cultural patterns of their own environments. Many of them think that criminal affairs are more appropriate for male lawyers,” says Hélene Cissé who, after practising law in Senegal for a quarter of a century, is impressed with the professionalism and determination of women lawyers on the continent. For her personally, international criminal law is more than just a job. “It has always been my passion,” she says.
Bapita decided to become a lawyer at age 11 when her father had been imprisoned by the Mobotu regime and her mother could not afford legal fees for his defence. Her dream of helping people who could not afford lawyers came true.
Bapita thinks that more women could make it as ICC legal representatives if only they had a bit more confidence in themselves. International law is the same everywhere, she says, except that the ICC is a more sophisticated “electronic court” that requires sharp computer skills. “This might make you laugh, but when I arrived at the ICC in 2006, I had never even appeared before the supreme court in my own country!”
“Women just need to dare,” she sighs.
 
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