THE DRAGON SLAYER
How Canada’s Payam Akhavan became the bane of tyrants and war criminals,
“Two very large military intelligence men showed up at my hotel around midnight. They said ‘you’re coming with us.’ I had to think fast: it was not something I learned in law school.” PAYAM AKHAVAN MCGILL PROFESSOR
An appointment to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague doesn’t sound like the stuff of airport thrillers.
But for McGill University international law professor Payam Akhavan, 50, it’s the culmination of an edgy adventure that plunged him into international intrigue and set a struggling country back from the brink of chaos.
The court is one of the world’s most important, giving states a forum for settling disputes before they turn to war. Although most appointments are made by a nominee’s home country, Akhavan’s — unusually — was by Bangladesh.
The trail leads back to 2008, when the country’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, was imprisoned on dubious corruption charges. And Akhavan, well known as an international prosecutor and voice for global justice, received an unexpected call from her teenage niece in London.
“She was trying to find a lawyer to help her aunt, and asked a friend whose father was a lawyer,” Akhavan said in a phone interview from Montreal. “He asked another lawyer, who suggested me. It was as random as that.”
What convinced him to help was Hasina’s tragic history, as well as her plight. “In Hasina’s family, only she and her sister had survived a massacre. Now she was in prison. She had medical problems, and there were fears that she would be poisoned.”
Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was Bangladesh’s first president. He had unexpectedly won a vote for autonomy in what was then East Pakistan, sparking a savage reprisal from the Pakistani army that left at least 300,000 Bengalis dead, but led to the founding of the country in 1971.
Four years later Rahman was assassinated along with most of his family in a military coup. Hasina, who was out of the country, escaped — and later returned to lead the opposition in parliament.
She became prime minister in 1996, but lost power amid violent political turbulence. To prevent her from making a comeback in the 2008 elections, she was jailed by an interim military-backed government on corruption charges.
Akhavan was asked to step in and save her. But when his outspoken advocacy for the imprisoned politician crackled through the world’s media, he was blacklisted in Bangladesh.
Nevertheless, Hasina’s niece persuaded him to attend the trial, and he managed to slip past the authorities with a visa obtained in Bangladesh’s Jordan embassy, with the help of a friend.
Trailed by military intelligence in Bangladesh, he says, “I snuck into the trial with a gaggle of blackfrocked barristers.”
The trial was held in Dhaka’s heavily guarded parliament building, with the public barred. But Akhavan found himself next to the defendant’s box where Sheikh Hasina sat. And he was able to talk to the only witness against her, a cousin who told Akhavan he had been tortured to force him to testify against her.
When the star witness told the court he had never paid a bribe to Hasina and the prosecutor fought back, “pandemonium broke out. The whole case fell apart. In the midst of it the prosecutor noticed me in the courtroom, and I was kicked out.”
Chaos also broke out in the street, as thousands of protesters were held back by soldiers: “the crowd rushed toward me and I thought I’d be trampled to death.”
Reporters surrounded Akhavan, and microphones were shoved in his face. “I was stunned,” he said. “I told them ‘they have turned the parliament into a prison. This trial is a sham. She’s innocent and this is sabotaging democracy.’”
Word spread quickly, and Akhavan became a lightning rod for the protest movement, a perilous position in a country with a history of bloodshed and brutality.
“Two very large military intelligence men showed up at my hotel around midnight. They said ‘you’re coming with us.’ I had to think fast: it was not something I learned in law school.”
Akhavan convinced the hard men that aid — and military support — would be withdrawn from the country if anything happened to him. And he agreed to leave the next morning.
But his ties with Bangladesh were to continue. After Hasina won an overwhelming election victory, Akhavan was asked to become legal counsel for Bangladesh for arbitration of international boundary disputes with neighbours Burma and India, resulting in resounding wins that made legal history.
His new appointment to the court of arbitration is for a six-year term, serving on a rotating roster and taking part in tribunals when chosen by states. Apart from settling disputes, the court also nominates members of the International Court of Justice and candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize.
All these experiences, Akhavan says, have made him a better teacher, and mentor to McGill law students he hopes will follow in his footsteps.
“In a very profound way they have enriched my teaching and scholarship. I have seen the reality in which international norms operate, and how important it is to have institutions for compulsory dispute settling. Politics has to be taken out of the theatre of violence.”
From a young age, his family witnessed that violence up close.
Aprosecutor, and a witness While still in his teens, Payam Akhavan felt the full force of the world’s injustice.
In 1981, his uncle, Firouz Naimi, a respected physician, was abducted and tortured to death in the Iranian city of Hamadan because of his Baha’i faith, condemned as heresy by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s clerical regime. Another uncle was arrested and executed a year later.
But when17-year-old Baha’i Mona Mahmudnizhad, a high school student of Akhavan’s own age, was hanged in 1983, it was a turning point. He volunteered for the cast of a music video called Mona With the Children, made by a Canadian artist.
The video gained instant popularity — and launched a lifelong odyssey for justice and human rights that has taken Akhavan to war zones, world capitals and the highest international courts.
“Mona’s hanging shook me to the core,” he says. “You feel helpless. I spent the rest of my life trying to figure out how to fight for justice against all odds, speaking truth to power in front of a large audience to make people understand.”
Born in Tehran, Akhavan came to Toronto with his family before Iran’s 1979 revolution. Set on a career in international law, he graduated from Osgoode Hall Law School, then took graduate degrees at Harvard Law School, where his classmates included Barack Obama and “a half-brother of Osama bin Laden.”
While other young lawyers followed the money to Wall Street, Akhavan went to the UN, helping to draft a document that became the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Still in his 20s, he plunged in at the deep end as a field officer investigating human rights abuses in the midst of the Bosnian war that ripped through former Yugoslavia.
In May 1993, he documented the horrifying aftermath of a massacre of more than 100 Muslim women, children and men in the village of Ahmici, where they were systematically shot and burned to death by a Croatian militia.
There, he had his own close encounter with death. “It’s easy to be idealistic about human rights in the classroom,” he says. “But when you’re in the midst of mutilated bodies and a sniper is trying to kill you the world looks very different.”
For the young lawyer the carnage in Ahmici was “devastating. Bosnia was radical evil on a whole different scale. At an early age you’re not prepared for this. It took many years and many sleepless nights to get over it.”
But fate took an interesting turn. After Akhavan became the first legal adviser to the prosecutor at the newly created International Criminal Tribune for Former Yugoslavia in 1994, he testified against Croatian Gen. Tihomir Blaskic, who was held responsible for the Ahmici massacre and other atrocities, in a war crimes trial beginning three years later.
“It was astonishing that I was in that courtroom testifying against him,” Akhavan says. “I was not only a prosecutor, but a witness.”
Blaskic’s 45-year sentence was later reduced on appeal and he was granted early release when new evidence emerged that he was not guilty of personally overseeing the attack.
After leaving the tribunal in 2000, Akhavan attended the trial of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, ac- cused of fueling the wars in Yugoslavia that left more than 100,000 people dead.
“Having spent a decade of my life amid mass graves, suffering and horror, there was a sense of futility. But then against overwhelming odds, you see the star villain in the dock.”
Admittedly “burnt out” by his experiences, Akhavan persisted. “You have to shine a light into the dark abyss and say that there is something called international law and human rights. Even if we can’t immediately enforce it, it must be the basis for the exercise of power.”
His “addictive” quest for justice would take him beyond the Balkans to countries including Cambodia, Guatemala, East Timor, Rwanda and Iraq. He was a founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre and a prosecutor of a “people’s tribunal” to expose the thousands of murders of innocent people instigated by the Khomeini regime.
In his more than two-decade career, Akhavan has had a hand in some of the most dramatic human rights cases of the day.
Among others, he helped to set up the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda after the1994 genocide, stood up for the rights of U.S. citizens designated as enemy combatants, was a counsel on the landmark cases on the Armenian genocide and advised Haiti’s government on prosecution of former dictator JeanClaude Duvalier.
“Payam is an outstanding scholar, advocate, human rights lawyer and has an enormous reservoir of expertise,” says international lawyer and former federal justice minister Irwin Cotler, who recruited him to McGill’s law faculty in 2006. “He is really ingenious for legal initiatives in holding violators to account — he thinks out of the box.”
Returning to Canada was a natural choice for Akhavan.
As a single parent of two sons, now 12 and 14, he says, “I wanted my children to be brought up in Canada.” And as an international lawyer, he was struck by the “remarkable contrast between Canada and the U.S. on the relevance of human rights to our conception of the world.”
Although the pace of his life is exhausting, he is convinced that “bearing witness is the beginning of all justice. It’s the fundamental act of empathy.”
It leaves little down time. In addition to his full teaching schedule as an associate professor, he is helping to set up a truth commission in Iraqi Kurdistan for Yazidis whose family members have been kidnapped, killed, raped and tortured by Daesh. And he is campaigning for Canada to bring a case against Syria to the International Court of Justice for crimes against humanity.
Meanwhile, Akhavan has been chosen to deliver the 2017 Massey Lectures, to be titled In Search of Justice: A Human Rights Odyssey. They will be held in five cities across Canada and broadcast on the CBC.
Being chosen for the prestigious series, he says, is the “ultimate honour for someone arriving in the country speaking just a few words of English and surviving schoolyard bullying, to take his place among the giants of the Canadian intellectual and literary community.”
He adds, “a career in human rights is about being in the right place at the wrong time. The ultimate success of an international human rights lawyer is a world in which he can be unemployed.”