Episode 26 (Part 2) - Bringing Down the Dictators - Hissène Habré of Chad

If you've ever wondered how much can one person do to bring about international justice against the world's dictators, the three parts of Episode 26 will provide some amazing answers. Tonight we talk again with a very special guest: international human rights lawyer and 'dictator hunter' Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch. Reed famously once said, and we para-phrase "If you kill one person, you go to jail, if you kill 40 you are put in an insane asylum, and if you kill 40,000 you get a safe haven with your bank account in another country." How sadly true this is. Reed has dedicated his entire working life to the pursuit of human rights, with the past two decades or so focused on bringing former heads of state and political leaders to justice for crimes committed while they were in power. Following the first part of Episode 26 where Reed outlined the efforts to hold former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet to justice when Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 for crimes committed during his vicious reign that lasted from 1973-1990, tonight's episode switches continents and moves to Africa. Part 2 of Episode 26 tells the remarkable story of a two-decade long quest to bring one of Africa's worst dictators to justice for his crimes. With the backing of the United States, Hissène Habré seized power in the impoverished nation of the Republic of Chad in 1982 and ruled until 1990 when he was forced to flee to Senegal. Reed and a group of Habré''s victims faced countless obstacles in their search for accountability but refused to give up, and as a result Habré was sentenced to life in prison in 2016. He is now behind bars in a Dakar prison. Reed has been involved in many other cases concerning crimes committed by political leaders, and in the final part of this series, we will discuss his ongoing work to end impunity and bring dictators to justice, as well as his thoughts on the future of international criminal justice, where we stand in the fight for human rights, and who might be the next dictator to be brought to court. Jointly Venturing would again like to thank Reed for joining us in Episode 26! *** Reed Brody is Counsel for Human Rights Watch, where he works alongside atrocity victims who are fighting for justice. His advocacy with the victims of the exiled former dictator of Chad, Hissène Habré – who was convicted of crimes against humanity in Senegal – and in the cases of Augusto Pinochet and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier has been featured in five films, including “The Dictator Hunter.” He currently works with victims of the former dictator of Gambia Yahya Jammeh. He wrote four Human Rights Watch reports on U.S. treatment of prisoners in the “war on terror” and the book “Faut-il Juger George Bush?” Before joining Human Rights Watch, he led United Nations teams investigating massacres in the Democratic Republic of Congo and monitoring human rights in El Salvador, and he helped to prosecute human rights crimes in Haiti. He coordinated the 1997 International Commission of Jurists report “Tibet: Human Rights and the Rule of Law.” In 1996, he was expelled from Indonesian-occupied East Timor. At the 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, he coordinated lobbying for 2,700 NGO representatives and helped negotiate the creation of the post of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. His 1984 investigation uncovered atrocities by the U.S.-backed “contras” against Nicaraguan civilians and led to a halt in U.S. funding. In 2016, he represented US journalist Amy Goodman to dismiss criminal charges for reporting on an attack against Native American-led anti-pipeline protesters at Standing Rock, North Dakota. In January 2017, he was elected to the International Commission of Jurists.