To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène Habré by Reed Brody

Abstract

Reviewed by: To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène Habré by Reed Brody Naomi Roht-Arriaza (bio) Reed Brody, To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène Habré (Columbia University Press 2022), ISBN 9780231202589, 296 pages. When the verdict was announced in a Dakar courtroom in May 2016, it marked the culmination of a decades-long effort to bring Chad’s former dictator, Hissène Habré, to justice for crimes against humanity. It was also the first time that domestic courts located outside the country where the crimes took place brought a former head of state to justice for international crimes. The remarkable saga of the Habré case is told in a recent book by Reed Brody, former counsel at Human Rights Watch (HRW) and a key actor in supporting, guiding, and backing the case over many years. The book is required reading for anyone interested in international justice or human rights, but it’s also a moving meditation on the effect of North-South power dynamics on activists, the personal toll on those involved of continuing to fight, and all the ways in which the stars must align for justice to prevail. Habré ruled Chad from 1982 to 1990. According to one of the first truth commissions, established after his overthrow, he killed at least 40,000 people, tortured thousands, razed villages, and attacked ethnic groups he perceived as potential opponents. He was supported in this by the US Reagan administration, which saw him as a bulwark against Libyan leader Mohamar Qaddafi, and by the French. Eventually, he was removed in a coup, and took up a gilded exile in Senegal, helped by the millions he stole from the Chadian treasury. Brody tells the story of Habré’s misrule succinctly, but most of the book focuses on his victims and their almost forty-year struggle for justice. He writes chronologically about the investigation and trial, focusing on major incidents, twists and turns, and the strategic decisions (good and bad) that drove the process. I. EVERYTHINGEVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE One of the takeaways from the book involves the need for those seeking justice to look everywhere, and to play multilevel chess. Dictators and war criminals have huge advantages of money, contacts, and powerful networks to protect them. To fight back, advocates and victims must use all the avenues they can simultaneously and sequentially. This insight isn’t unique to the team pursuing Habré: the efforts to bring Augusto Pinochet to justice in the 1990s spanned not only Spain and the United Kingdom (as well as Chile, of course), but also Belgium, Argentina, France, and other possible forums.1 As both Brody and Chadian lawyer for the victims Jacqueline Moudeïna (in a foreword) note, the precedent of Pinochet’s arrest in London, and its positive impact on both prosecutions in Chile and on efforts to use universal [End Page 335] jurisdiction against despots elsewhere, were important to the Chadians as they considered their strategy. But more than any previous efforts, the Habré case drew on a wealth of international and regional forums and strategically combined them. When it looked like the Senegalese government would expel Habré, putting him beyond the reach of justice, lawyers for the victims went to the UN Committee on Torture to pressure Senegal to honor its “extradite or prosecute” commitments under the Convention Against Torture.2 When Senegal refused to act on a Belgian request to extradite Habré for trial in Belgium or to try him in Senegal, they convinced the Belgian government to complain to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ’s subsequent decision was a huge win for human rights advocates, establishing that the extradite or prosecute provisions of the Torture Convention (and other human rights, anti-terrorist act, and anti-corruption treaties) could not be indefinitely ignored or delayed.3 The African Union (AU) eventually became a key political actor in creating the Extraordinary African Chambers (EAC) that convicted Habré. Brody’s book, written for a general audience, doesn’t detail the legal background, structure, and operations of the court that eventually tried and convicted Habré. But it’s worth pausing a moment to...