INTERVIEW WITH CAROLYN McCOOL, A CANADIAN LAWYER WORKING ABROAD

In December, 2006, members of the University of New Brunswick CLA-ACE Student Chapter interviewed an international lawyer named Carolyn McCool, to get her advice about careers in international law and development work.

Carolyn McCool is a refugee lawyer who began her international legal career by going to Kosovo to work for the CIDA-funded Balkans Civilian Deployment Project. While in Kosovo, she worked first as the Director of the Mitrovica region for the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, and then as the Director of Democratization in Pristina. Since returning to Canada in late 2002, Carolyn continues to work on international development projects as a consultant in Kosovo and Afghanistan.

What are some practical steps a lawyer can take to begin a career in international law and development?

The two great activities are learning and helping. Do everything you can to educate yourself about the issues in development work. There are phrases – nation-building, state-building, institution-building, peace-building, development assistance, emergency aid – which have imprecise meanings, but if you study them critically and understand them as working tools, rather than divine or immutable concepts, and start to tug on them, then like threads to a seam, you’ll be drawn to intersections of thought and action. Once you get a handle on some of the basic ideas, look around your own community and see what organisations there are that are doing those kinds of things, and get involved. In many Canadian cities there are new immigrant support organisations or welcome centres, survivors of torture offices, and branches of major human rights organisations and aid agencies (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, PEN International, CARE, Save the Children,) including Canadian-based international organisations such as Rights and Democracy, and IMPACS. Spend some time on the web, make a list of them all and see what you’re most interested in. Call them up and offer your time. If you’re in a small town, establish e-mail communications and see what you can do to help out on a long distance basis. Not all organisations are going to be able to accommodate much in the way of volunteer assistance, but it’s worth a shot.

Always keep in mind that there are likely to be major differences in experience and perspectives between refugee, exiled and expatriate communities and the societies which they have left behind, forcibly or voluntarily. You will have to learn to keep a distance from the political views of the people you work with, and never assume that the views you are exposed to, here in Canada, about particular countries, are appropriate to take abroad with you. Expatriates’ ignorance of the conditions ‘back home’, and their false belief that they can run their home country, has been a negative factor in more than one peace-building endeavour.

It is possible to take courses in peace-building. The Pearson Peacekeeping Centre here in Canada has been offering courses to military personnel and civilians for years. The European Academy for International Training, in Spain, and the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Ghana are more recent institutions. If you are interested, look for a one- or two-week course which has a practical aspect as well. Ideally this would include some practical training in things like map-reading, navigation and two-way radios, mission life and how to get a job, as well as all of the basic elements of military and civilian institution-building and humanitarian aid. If you do decide to take a course like this, remember that everything you learn will be something you should be able to re-transmit on to people that you work with in a post-conflict society.

What practical steps can a law student take to start an international legal career?

As a law student you are suddenly part of one of the great professions, globally, and one that can, potentially, give you access to work in many areas of law in many parts of the world. The Canadian legal profession is increasingly active outside of Canada. There are committees of the Canadian Bar Association, e.g., international committees, refugee committees, and independent organisations, such as Canadian Lawyers Abroad, Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada, and International Criminal Defense Attorneys Association that you can contact to offer assistance on a volunteer basis. There are also organisations that may take on interns, such as various international criminal tribunals (the ICC, ICTY, ICTR, etc.), the United Nations through some of its agencies such as UN Volunteers (UNV), and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Start with the CBA and any other domestic legal organisations you can find, and work out from there.

What skills can you develop to prepare yourself for overseas work?

You will want to develop (1) organisational and time-management, (2) cross-cultural communication and (3) professional skills. But first and foremost, you have to develop your ability to be teachable. You have to understand that you know very little about what your hosts, and their country, have been through, and let them teach you. You have to be prepared to realise that they know more than you do about what they need and how to do it, while needing the support of others who have not suffered as much as they have and, therefore, have more peace of mind to help them identify and assess their options and make practical decisions. At the same time, you need to be smart, sensitive, competent, consistent, fair, firm, a great team player and capable of working independently. You need to know what your limits are, and be prepared to push them. You need to be able to help someone learn how to run a meeting – very importantly, and especially in the case of younger people, the skill of chairing by listening to what others have to say, rather than all the time telling them what to do – and write a report about all of that by candle-light in freezing temperatures. You need to be able to keep your head, and follow instructions, when a situation deteriorates into frightening danger. And you still need to be teachable, in a foreign culture, and understand that you don’t know what it is that you don’t know, and that others, i.e. the people whose land you are living in, do know. To develop all these skills, you can seek out the most difficult projects that you can find. Find a lawyer that will let you work on a complex case. Find a group of new immigrants that want help organising a non-profit society. Work in a legal aid clinic where you start out with absolutely no idea what is going on, or what anyone is talking about. Become teachable, get yourself organised, learn to work with people from other cultures, and learn the law.

What kind of legal education and legal background would be most helpful to those want to embark on an international legal career?

Anyone wanting to work as a Canadian lawyer abroad needs a thorough grounding in Canadian law. This includes such black-letter topics as property and corporate law. Courses in the law of war are a good introduction if that is going to be an area you work in, but remember that societies emerging from violent conflict are building themselves from the ground, literally and metaphorically. Property disputes are a huge area of work as huge numbers of people start to return home, sometimes after years of absence. The law of property is quite likely not going to be the same there as it is in Canada, but having a good grasp of our system will at least mean that you’re not too intimidated to learn another. The same is true of the corporate and banking/finance sector – there are major questions to be sorted out in a post-conflict society. What are for-profit and not-for-profit organisations? How do you set up a banking institution so that the new Ministry of Economic Development can start a micro-credit loan programme? These are major questions. In addition, don’t forget criminal law. At an international level, human rights and criminal law merge. You tree-hugging human rights activists, and you hard-boiled criminal defenders and prosecutors, have to learn each others’ languages, if you want to work abroad, just as all of you lawyers are going to have to learn the various languages of the military, the police and the humanitarian assistance community

The other thrust of your education should be to learn as much as you can about the major systems of law in use, globally, today. There is the common law, and civil law, both of which we have in Canada. A grounding in both would be invaluable in working abroad. Many post-conflict societies are working in both of those traditions, because of the prevalence of European and North American legal advisors, all touting the supposed virtues of their own countries’ legal systems. A debate between American and European lawyers in the context of a country ravaged by war can be a frightening event, and you will be in a stronger position if you can understand both and try to mediate! In addition, however, there are these legal systems: Islamic law (Shari’a), customary law and international law. Don’t be afraid of Islamic law, it gets a bad press for political reasons. It’s a wide-ranging and long-established (nearly 1,400 years old) system of law in use in the Muslim world in different ways, depending on the country. Customary law is the traditional form of law, or decision-making, in practice in many parts of the world, and is as varied as those places are. By “international law”, in the context of post-conflict societies, is usually meant both that body of law which governs the relations between states, and that body of international covenants, instruments or treaties that set international standards of human rights.

The best legal education is that which incorporates all of this. I’d say most of us would be looking at a master’s degree, or two, in order to achieve such a goal. There are, I believe, graduate degrees in Islamic law available in French and English in some parts of the world.

What can you expect when working overseas?

Overall there are two sides to an early post-conflict mission: military and civilian. The military side may be a peacekeeping force (as under the United Nations or some other multi-lateral organisation,) or may have a combat presence. On the civilian side, there will in general be two types of work: development, emergency relief, and refugee or displaced person re-settlement on the one hand, and on the other hand, building the institutions of governance and society. The people involved in each of these areas of work will not necessarily have any expertise in the others, but will be required to work closely together. In fact coordination of effort is a major pre-occupation in an early post-conflict society.

What it’s going to be like will depend on where you wind up. If you go to live and work in a very early post-conflict society, living and working conditions can be extremely limited. This can mean almost no electricity or running water or telecommunications or e-mail. This can mean, in fact, almost nothing in the way of infra-structure at all, except tents, or perhaps some form of building structures still standing to work in, some vehicles, pens, paper, candles, and two-way radios for communication. Assignment to countries or societies where the conflict is a bit more in the past, or where development has been an on-going initiative for several years, will be accordingly more comfortable.

But the most important thing to say about what it will be like is that it can touch your heart, and affect your mind, and change your life. If you let yourself be the teachable person we talked about above, you will never, ever, be the same again. This will not necessarily be an easy thing, or without pain, and we can talk about all of that in another forum, but it can change you, and your life, irrevocably.

Any final comments?

However you pursue your own path in this area, remember that it is an area of work which must be built upon values. If you are going abroad to get rich, or to get married, stay away from post-conflict societies. They are fragile beyond comprehension already. The goal, however it is articulated by the people that live there, will almost certainly be something like sustainable peace. In order to help them achieve that, we must work on the basis of first principles, core among which are respect for local ownership of the state-building project, and the centrality of the rule of law, whatever their law is, in that project. If you keep those two things engraved on the hard drive of your brain, you cannot go too far wrong, and you will become a better person, and a better lawyer, for it.