W&M professor helped Kosovo write its constitution
Friday, Apr 04, 2008 - 08:20 PM
BY ZINIE CHEN SAMPSON
The Associated Press
William and Mary law professor Christie S. Warren is leaving
Williamsburg tomorrow to see one of her clients -- the newly
independent nation of Kosovo. The country's leaders sought her help in
drafting a new constitution after breaking away from Serbia.
Warren and two other legal experts who worked on the project plan to
be at a signing ceremony Monday in Pristina to mark the adoption of
the new do***ent, which they helped craft, in part by giving Kosovar
leaders information about other nations' legislative and judicial
systems so they could decide what would work best for their fledgling
country.
"These are critically im****tant decisions that must be made by the
people in the country and the people who are going to be impacted by
that -- not by the international advisers," said Warren, head of the
College of William and Mary's Comparative Legal Studies and Post-
Conflict Justice program. "We don't go over there and write their
constitution."
The United Nations began administering Kosovo in 1999 following a NATO
bombing campaign to halt a Serb crackdown on ethnic Albanian
separatists.
Kosovo's new leaders wanted to depart from Serbia's government and
legal structure. A little more than a year ago, Warren, Tufts
University law professor Louis Aucoin and U.S. District Judge John
Tunheim of Minnesota began advising the Kosovo's leaders.
Warren, Aucoin and Tunheim held a series of meetings during which they
presented comparisons of how other nations dealt with certain issues
and the array of possible governmental structures Kosovo could adopt.
After the first draft was created, the Kosovar leaders met with
citizens, asking what they wanted in the constitution. They also set
up a Web site so people could post their opinions, Warren said.
The resulting constitution will differ substantially from Serbia's,
Aucoin said, and in many ways will be one of the world's most
progressive.
"The Kosovars have taken some of the best lessons learned from some of
the recent constitution-making experiences in the world," he said. The
do***ent will provide strong protections for citizens, including a
constitutional court, key to safeguarding human rights and the rights
of minorities, he said.
In February, Kosovo declared independence.
Serbia and its ally Russia have continued to oppose Kosovo
independence.
Kosovo is one of more than 35 governments that Warren has assisted
through working with the United Nations, the State Department and
nongovernmental organizations over the past 12 years after genocide,
war and upheavals disrupted their legal systems.
Warren's advisory work dovetails with her courses, including
comparative law, Islamic law, and post-conflict justice. And in many
of the legal development projects, her students get to do research on
issues such as establi****ng a public-defender system in Afghanistan
and developing ethics and conflict-of-interest standards in Ukraine
and Moldova. They work by phone and e-mail during the school year, and
a number of them get to go overseas during the summer.
Ryan Igbanol, who graduated from William and Mary's law school last
spring, was the coordinator for the constitution-drafting team and its
advisers, and said he was responsible for compiling the reasoning
behind the provisions of the new constitution.
"It was an absolutely humbling experience," he said in an e-mail.
Doing something concrete and real -- helping people solve their
problems -- is what being a lawyer should be about, Warren said.
"They're not supposed to just sit in an office giving abstract
advice."
Then a criminal-defense lawyer, Warren volunteered in 1994 to help
train Cambodia's first wave of defense attorneys after the nation's
new constitution -- with the help of Aucoin -- was adopted in 1993, 14
years after the end of the rule of the Khmer Rouge.
The genocidal regime had killed all the people it considered
intellectuals, including lawyers.
After a couple of weeks in Cambodia she was hooked.
"I thought, This is the work I want to do," Warren said in an
interview yesterday. "I moved to Cambodia for two years with my kids;
from then I started working with other countries."
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