Legal Village

Reconstructing the rule of law

Posted 9/04/2008 by Ben Hallman

Baghdad is quiet today. There’s a curfew until midnight, which means no cars are allowed in the capital and all the Iraqi Government employees have the day off. Fortunately for me, US Government officials in Iraq work seven days a week.

I spent the morning and afternoon at the headquarters of the Baghdad Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), which is located in an office building near the US embassy. By way of orientation, the press centre is on the northern edge of the Green Zone, near the only hotel therein, the al-Rashid. (I went to the al-Rashid today, too, but I’ll save that for another post.)

Security in that part of the zone is even tighter than it is on my side and getting there means running a gauntlet of checkpoints. I’ve been hand-searched half a dozen times today. (An interesting side-note: like many functions here, security is run by private contractors. And every private guard I’ve seen in Baghdad is Peruvian.)

First, some background on the Baghdad PRT rule of law team. It advises 15 local, family and juvenile courts in Baghdad. About half of these are criminal courts and the other half civil. The team leader is Wilson Myers, a defense attorney from Bay Minette, Alabama.

For a government lawyer in Iraq, Myers is an anomaly. The overwhelming majority of the lawyers here are prosecutors of some kind and most of the other rule of law coordinators are assistant US attorneys. (There are eight permanent PRTs in Iraq and about a dozen other 'e-PRTs', smaller groups that are embedded with the military.)

Organisationally, the team operates under the auspices of the State Department, which provides "substantive guidance" on its activities, Myers told me. In practice, the team has wide latitude on which projects it chooses to pursue.

Aside from his job overseeing the most important rule of law team in Iraq, I became interested in Myers for his work with local legal professionals and for a focus on civil law and courts, which had been mostly ignored until recently. On a typical day, Myers and his team might visit a few courthouses and a police station, meet with the head of the Iraq Bar Association or visit the Baghdad School of Law.

But embassy security has locked them down until at least early next week. My timing, as it turns out, is terrible. So instead of visiting real Iraq tomorrow, I’m meeting with senior rule of law officials at the US embassy instead. My plan B, which was to visit the PRT in Tikrit, also fell through. Plan C is still in rough draft form.