By Christina Schweighofer
When Shannon Raj JD 2011 was a 3L student in the USC International Human Rights Clinic, she sometimes couldn’t believe how challenging the work felt; asked to craft a memorandum for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on superior responsibility for genocide, she and two fellow students had to edit and revise the document over and over before Professor Hannah Garry, who directs the Clinic at USC Gould, was willing to sign off on it.
But the fastidiousness paid off. That same year, after passing the California bar exam, Raj traveled to Arusha, Tanzania, to work with the Rwanda Tribunal — and there was her memo, in circulation to the judges. “It was being used and applied as they drafted their judgments,” she says. What she understood then was that Garry, when teaching them the law and skills necessary for international legal practice, holds students to the standards of the field, no less.
 Shannon in front of the Lebanon Tribunal | Seven years on, Raj is more than grateful for the pressure. The demands of the Clinic prepared her not only for her work in Arusha but also for a USC fellowship program started in 2012 with the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) in The Hague, which she finished in March. It brought her one step closer to fulfilling her decade-old dream of a career in international criminal law. “This past year,” she says, “has been one of the most personally and professionally rewarding of my life.” |
Instituted in 2009, the STL has clear mandates: to investigate the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri and the related deaths of 21 others, and to prosecute those responsible. Whereas other tribunals have jurisdiction over crimes against humanity or genocide, the STL is the first to deal with terrorism as an international crime. The court applies Lebanese law first; but if the local law is ambiguous or in conflict with international treaties the country is party to, the STL looks to international criminal law to determine what the law is. Raj says that it can be challenging to define which law applies. This makes the Lebanon Tribunal unique.
As a fellow with the STL Appeals Chamber, Raj advised the five appellate judges on procedural and substantive issues of international law. She assisted the judges with their deliberations and with drafting decisions, sat in on hearings in the courtroom, conducted research, and created advisory memoranda on unprecedented legal problems. One of the decisions she worked on last fall was defining the law that applies in matters of conspiracy and criminal association.
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| Members of the Appeals Chamber, Trial Chamber, Pre-Trial Chamber and President's Office |
“Shannon was the perfect fit for this fellowship with her dedication to international justice and excellent lawyering skills — it was such a pleasure teaching her in my very first Clinic class. Because of her and Clinic graduates like her, USC enjoys high regard among international tribunals for training students who hit the ground running in their practice,” says Garry. Raj’s passion for international criminal law goes back to her undergraduate years at UCLA. Interning with the U.S. Mission to the U.N. in New York in the summer of 2006, she witnessed the U.N. Security Council debate on legal responses to the genocide in Darfur. “[The experience] turned me off of politics,” she says, “but on to law and the law of genocide and war crimes. I was really attracted to the more concrete steps being taken at the tribunals.”
She subsequently interned with the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in South Africa, enrolled at USC Gould where she participated in the International Human Rights Clinic, which Garry launched at the Law School in January 2011, and worked on the ground with the Rwanda Tribunal.
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| Shannon and her Appeals Chamber colleagues, Adrian Plevin and Helen Brown |
Being half Indian and half Irish, Raj says that she has “always felt a bit at home abroad” but USC Gould’s International Human Rights Clinic helped prepare her for the challenges of a multicultural professional setting. The five appellate judges she worked with at the STL come from the Czech Republic, Lebanon, Uganda and New Zealand. As an advisor she had to be sensitive to cultural differences and matters of etiquette, as she prepared for hearings.
Raj and her husband, also an attorney, want to stay in The Hague indefinitely. While she plans on continuing a career in international criminal law, she will spend the next few months tending to her newborn son — and learning from other expat families about parenting styles around the world. “You take what you can from every culture,” she says.
