A matter of justice

Rebecca Elvin, who is off to work at the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Photo / Dean Purcell

Crimes against humanity. War crimes. Not many of us would wish to dwell on such things.

But one Friday afternoon last July, Rebecca Elvin found herself doing just that while combing the internet for something to do before embarking on her master of laws.

"I was at work [in the clerks' office at the Auckland High Court] at lunchtime and I was looking and saw that the application for this particular job was due at 4pm the same day. I thought 'oh my goodness'. But then I realised the time difference [between New Zealand and the Netherlands] gave me 12 extra hours." She laughs.

"I finished work and sat down with the application and just sort of banged out this essay, stayed up quite late, got it all done and all they had was a fax number to this place, there was no email address.

"So I faxed the thing off to this number, into the ether, and I didn't hear anything back ..." By the time the ultimate recipient of that fax - the Prosecutor's Office at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague - responded, the young Auckland lawyer could barely remember applying for the position.

"I'd actually almost forgotten about it, when three or four months later I got this email saying 'congratulations'."

This month Elvin began a six-month stint with the Prosecutor's Office at the ICC. It is a fixed-term internship which will take her into the dark centre of war crime, justice and - the subject of that last minute, late night essay - the enforcement of the rule of international law.

The ICC, established by the Rome Statute of 1998, is the first permanent, treaty-based, international criminal court. Until now international war crimes, such as those committed during World War II and in places such as Cambodia and Kosovo, have been the subject of ad hoc trials.

The new, permanent ICC, of which 110 countries are members (not including the United States or China), has been established as an ongoing attempt to "help end impunity for the perpetrators of the most serious crimes of concern to the international community" ...

Translation: the court, which began its first trial only last January, is charged with the long-term task of investigating and trying those who have committed some of the world's most appalling crimes.

Its current investigations include atrocities committed after July 2002 in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Darfur, Sudan.

So why would a smart, young Auckland lawyer, just two years out of law school, and with another two ahead of her as a high court law clerk, want to wade through such a grisly morass as genocide in Dafur - even if only for a short time - at cost to herself?

The 26-year-old has sold her car and will be living on her savings to take up the opportunity. "I'm asking myself that, actually.

Justice is a term that people kind of bandy around, that means different things to different people. But I think I've got a real interest in how power is exercised, particularly in relation to vulnerable members of society. In the case of the ICC and the work they do, the people bearing the brunt of the violence are women and children.

"So at the ICC there is the opportunity to get some insight into the macro level of the law and politics and policy and how that plays out and how you give a voice to and representation to individuals that have suffered violence and oppression."

Law has always surrounded Elvin. Born in Tauranga, she was first child of two lawyers, Graeme Elvin and Fiona Mackenzie, who have practised there for more than two decades. Her father, who is also chairman of the Chiefs Super 14 franchise, specialises in commercial and trust law, while her mother focuses mainly on family law at the couple's firm, Mackenzie Elvin.

One of her three siblings, Tom, is also a lawyer and younger brother Edward looks likely to go to law school too. Yet law was the furthest thing from her mind growing up.

Indeed, after leaving Bethlehem College near Tauranga to board at St Cuthbert's College in Auckland (like her mother, she received a scholarship to the school), Elvin seemed certain to have quite a different professional life ahead of her, being accepted into the University of Auckland medical school.

But it wasn't quite so clear-cut as it seemed. She had, she admits, something like an existential crisis as her year 13 ended. Should she do medicine? It would be a good life, and comfortable. "But I felt like it would be missing something just in terms of how I'm built.

I felt like there was something else, so I went down to the University of Otago. I deferred my place at med school for a year and did some humanities papers and law. Then law just started capturing me, I guess."

Elvin, who was co-dux at St Cuthberts in 2001, would go on to graduate from Otago in 2008 with not only two degrees, in arts (majoring in English and politics) and law, but with first class honours for both.

Part of what captured her about law - rather than medicine - was a book a friend had given her during her first year at Otago.

In 1997 Gary Haugen a former US Department of Justice lawyer, set up a body called the International Justice Mission (IJM), an independent, Christian and US-based human rights agency whose teams of lawyers work around the world to provide justice for victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression.

"In the back of my mind [at Otago] I thought it would be wonderful to be able to go there and see what [IJM] were doing. So I thought if I did an academic exchange to the States for a year [I could] structure the exchange around the summer."

With the sort good fortune that perhaps only hard work brings, Elvin was accepted for a semester of law at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2006 before spending that summer on an IJM internship in Washington DC - though she hadn't actually been offered the latter until after she had begun studying at Berkeley.

Another internship - to complete her Berkeley study - followed late in the year, this time at a little place known as the Supreme Court in Washington. "It turned out there are quite a few citizenship restrictions [for internships] - I had only a study visa - and a lot of places you could apply to only if you were a US citizen."

The Supreme Court isn't one of them. "So presumptuously I put an application in right at the last minute and did an interview and got an internship there." Working in the office of the administrative assistant to the Chief Justice, with a guy from Texas, she was privileged to sit in on all oral arguments the court heard. "We had a lot of foreign delegates who visited ... and we'd be in charge of putting together these presentations on the American judicial system - which was slightly ironic.

Luckily I'd done constitutional law." Her eight months in Washington offered a range of experience - and not just in the law. "When I first arrived, someone was emailing around this document that gone from generation to generation of interns that basically lists every bar in Washington DC and the happy hours, so that you could eat really cheap all week.

"It's amazing how small, in terms of the people, Washington is. Everyone knows everything that's going on and everyone knows everyone else. It was remarkable the number of opportunities I had to meet people, to talk to people, from senators to having brown-bag lunches with the Attorney-General or whoever. For someone from nowhere who was nobody, somehow landing this internship, it was just phenomenal."

There were other eye-openers. "You go walking into the Supreme Court building every day for work and across the way is the Capitol and there is the occasional bomb scare or the guy high on crack who breaks in with a loaded gun or whatever. It's amazing how quickly you're like, 'okay, there's a guy with a gun'."

Hope. The word was spelled out in large metal, letters on the wall of the shared central Auckland flat Elvin called home until recently. The store where she bought the letters sold the whole alphabet, but she chose that word to adorn her wall.

"I guess it's a significant word for me. I think it's easy to lose sight of. I think a lot of things are broken and a lot of people are broken particularly in some of the areas I will have to work in ...

There is either a sense of helplessness or cynicism that it is really easy to default to and, for me, it's just a challenge to look beyond that." Beyond that includes, hopefully, after her stint at the Hague, a masters degree in law - she has applied to both Oxford and Harvard. She jokes that in September she may be back in Auckland looking for work if neither law school accepts her.

In the meantime, however, there is the ICC, though beyond legal research she was not yet sure, how her skills would be used in the Prosecutor's Office. But she is sure it will give her insight into the areas of law she wishes to pursue long term. "I've got some ideas that I'm really committed to, about law and justice, about social justice, and how these things link together. So I want to stay in that sort of sphere.

In terms of a [career] path, obviously there are choices. But in terms of the word path, I don't think that's the metaphor I'm going to go with. I think it's about engaging with opportunities and also with things in that sphere of interest, and passion, I guess. I think that is the model for my generation.

The reality is that it's not just going to be one job. I don't know if there is one career or job that I'm aiming for.

"In terms of the study I'm going to do [at Oxford or Harvard], I would really like to concentrate on comparative constitutional law and transitional justice. By that, I mean looking, systemically, at how to build a [legal] system that is fair and to build a system that actually works for people, for individuals. I don't know how it will all fit together, because that is policy almost, something structural. But there is also a sense of wanting to be on the ground too and doing advocacy. So I'm hoping that there is room, over the next 30 years, for a bit of both."