Global Policy Forum

By Lisa Fitterman

If there is one thing Elise Groulx has learned during her six-year quest for an international criminal lawyers' bar, it is this: one needs a thick skin, thicker than a pig's and maybe even thicker than an elephant's.

Elected the bar's first-ever executive president last spring (and recent recipient of the Quebec Bar Association's 2003 medal for service to her profession), Groulx recalled meeting a German woman a while back who told her just that, and she understood perfectly. After all, it's never easy being ignored. It's never easy talking to people who abruptly walk away, no matter if it's at a cocktail party or in the hallowed halls of the United Nations.

And it wasn't easy telling the forces behind the newly struck International Criminal Court that their plans were all wet because they had overlooked the need for defence lawyers in a system that would be dealing with such heinous crimes as genocide and rape. Sometimes, she felt like Dona Quixote, tilting at what seemed was an impossible dream, no matter her conviction that she and the few people helping her were right.

"When I started in 1996, nobody seemed concerned about the defence, which seemed really bad to me because I knew how political those trials could be, and how important it was when you're setting up a justice system that you have two sides," she said recently over coffee in her garden. "The defence wasn't organized. It had no institution, no base, no organization, no nothing. I realized we had to get involved right at the heart of the (ICC) negotiations." She shook her head and sighed. "So I started going to the United Nations," she continued. "I thought there would be institutions and lawyers flocking to do this and I thought, 'Gee, we're going to be a gang, it's going to be great, we're going to help each other out. There I was, a real idealist and then, I got there and I saw that I was alone."

We first wrote about Groulx in 1998, when she was still struggling to develop a network and get people to listen. She had already begun the Montreal-based International Association of Criminal Defence Attorneys, which was endorsed by bodies such as the Canadian Bar Association.

It marked the first time such an association existed; other worldwide lawyers' groups, such as the London-based International Bar Association and Avocats Sans Frontieres, with its head office in Brussels, cover all areas of legal practice.

But her progress stalled there, for she was told it was too late to have her ideas entrenched into the treaty that would form the ICC during a 1998 UN-sponsored conference in Rome. She'd have to wait until later, when the rules would be worked out. The imperatives in Rome, she said, were to create the position of independent prosecutor (Argentine human-rights lawyer Luis Moreno Ocampo was sworn in to the post in The Hague last month) and talk about an independent defence was "like the icing on a sundae - too much."

Still, Groulx, the daughter of the late Georges Groulx, an actor who was of the four founders of the Theatre du Nouveau Monde, soldiered on. She traveled. She argued with people who either had no idea who she was or wondered why this woman from a legal backwater such as Montreal was so passionate about something so distasteful.

"But I always wanted to be an international criminal lawyer so those two things have always been a constant in my life," she explained. "I studied in Paris and in London and there was nothing related to criminal law in the mid to late '70s. Nothing when I started."

Sure, she often wondered at what she was doing. Her husband, consultant Lew Diggs, supported her utterly, while her son, Laurence-Philippe, was 11 when she started and even traveled with her to New York.

But her daughters, twins Alexandra and Catherine, were only 3 and didn't understand why their mommy was always on the road.

"It brought me very deep inside myself as to why I had chosen such a hard path. Here, I was comfortable, known and doing a job that I loved," she said. "It was brought home when I got the bar medal and (Quebec batonnier Claude Leduc) said 'You don't move a mountain from one day to the next, you move little rocks.' It's been hard. It's been very hard."

And she drily noted that if she had gone to the UN to argue for better representation of women and children, she probably would have had an easier time. "But these people were building a court without thinking about the defence and basically, they thought they were doing something great and I came to tell them there was a problem, that they weren't doing it right," she said. "That didn't make me very popular."

(Jacques Larochelle, biker Maurice "Mom" Boucher's lawyer, once echoed Groulx when he defended his decision to defend Theoneste Bagosora, the alleged architect of the Rwandan genocide: "Boucher, Bagosora - both are accused of a crime and presumed innocent until proved guilty.")

Finally, in 1999, six months after the Rome conference, Groulx began to find support for her ideas from the French and the Dutch delegations. Then came the conferences, first in November 1999, again a year later and a third that was held in Paris under the aegis of that city's Paris Bar.

The Paris conference had an attendance of between 350 to 400; while there much discord among the participants, everyone came out resolved that there was a gaping need for what Groulx was trying to do.

In the spring of 2002, a draft document was finally produced at a conference in Montreal. Groulx's dream was realized: the bar is to be officially recognized this September in New York.

Erick Vanchestien, a lawyer who works with the provincial Commission des Services Juridiques and sits on the board of the international criminal lawyers association, said: "This isn't a black and white world. Elise had an important vision and it took sweat and a 'passion de coeur' to persuade others to take her seriously."

Groulx, who has included among her clients one of the Montreal police constables found guilty in 1995 of assaulting distraught taxi driver Richard Barnabe just before Christmas two years earlier, got her start practising at legal aid in Montreal. It was a grind - 400 to 500 cases a year, day in and day out, rushing between courtrooms, meeting clients and handling delays. It was also good training in both how to negotiate a labyrinthine justice system and deal with the approbation of a public who thought defending criminals was a terrible choice of career - skills that would prove invaluable later on.

"Say, for example, you're defending a man who is charged with the alleged rape of a little girl," she said. "That first morning you walk into a courtroom, you can hear a pin drop and you can feel everybody wondering, 'Why is she representing that guy?' A lot of people have asked me, 'Why do you want to defend criminals?' but it's not that. It's that the principle of justice has to be the same for all, for the rich, the poor, the innocent and the guilty.

"Justice serves a purpose," she continued. "If you're talking about war-torn countries, it's certainly part of re-establishing the rule of law, re-establishing democracy, of healing, to let people on both sides tell their stories.

"For history, it's so important that the stories are told in full. Nuremberg, the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa, it's all part of the healing."

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