Building Your Craft, People-Centered Justice, and Cross-Border Human Rights with Milena Klimberg van Marrewijk

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. Today I'm joined by Milena Klingberg Van Merwee. She is the Program Advisor on Human Rights and Access to Justice at the Cyrus R. Van Center for International Law. She holds an LLM from New York University School of Law and has incredible experiences in international arbitration, human rights litigation, and public international law. She's a trilingual international lawyer, and I'm so excited to chat with her this evening. Thank you so much for making the time to come on the show, Milena. Hi, Claudio. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor, and I'm excited to share more about my work. Amazing. I'm looking forward to it. And to start off our podcast, I'd love for you to tell us a little bit more about yourself, about your story. Introducing this journey that, that you have from practicing and studying law in Argentina to building an international career in France and in New York. So originally I'm from Buenos Aires. I studied law in University of Buenos Aires, and currently I work at the Ceres Vance Center for International Justice. I'm here based in New York. So just to give a brief introduction, the Vance Center is part of the New York City Bar Association. And what we do is we connect the pro bono capacity of law firms around the world with civil society organizations that need it. We work on a really broad set of issues, human rights, institutional integrity, environmental law, public interest reporting. So as I said, my path started at University of Buenos Aires. While I was there, I was working 2 very different worlds at the same time. So I was working in big law on arbitration and litigation as an intern. And on the other hand, I also interned and was a student advocate at one of Argentina's leading human rights organizations. During law school, I competed. In the Concours d'Arbitrage International de Paris, which is a moot court, and I won first place with my team. And this opened a door that I really didn't expect. So the first place award was an international visiting attorney position in Paris for 6 months. So I moved and spent about a year and a half there working on investment and commercial arbitration. And from there, I came to New York for my LLM in international legal studies at NYU. After my LLM, I did a fellowship with UNDP. And then joined the Vance Center. Fantastic. So I'll start by arbitration because I think they're, they're different, but what really drew me in arbitration, especially investment, was it's one of the few places where a young lawyer gets to work directly with public international law in the context of big law. So human rights was always a passion of mine, but I couldn't see a path very clear to that when I was starting. So in Paris, I was really lucky to work in investment arbitration representing states. And I was actually applying public international law. So there I learned a lot about interpreting treaties, state responsibility, how to understand international obligations. And those were very similar skills that I used today working in human rights, just going in a different direction. So these early experiences really taught me the craft, if that makes sense. So arbitration in international arbitration, international investment arbitration is extremely demanding about writing, evidence, procedure. So I learned a lot about how to build a record, how to build an argument, how to draft. So this taught me very valuable skills for my end goal that was human rights. And basically while I was working in arbitration, I always kept human rights in my mind. And just seeing public international law in practice made me think, okay, how can I apply this later in like human rights? Amazing. And going forward. I see that you later moved from commercial and investment arbitration into human rights and access to justice work. So I'm curious what led you to that transition? So I think human rights, as I said, was always there. So my first job was an internship in human rights, as I mentioned, but I took my arbitration time to build my technical foundation, but I always wanted to come back to human rights really. And the pivot point was the LLM at NYU where I tried to engage with every possible human program classes. I was a human rights scholar. I participated in the Global Justice Clinic, and I realized that my time in arbitration was done. I had learned the skills I needed to learn and wanted to transition into something else. I also see that some of the things that you worked on going forward in the human rights sphere have a lot to do with people-centered justice and justice reform in fragile settings. So I'm curious to hear from you a little bit of what does that mean in practice? Yeah, of course. So people-centered justice has always been a passion of mine and something I have seen in every job I have. So to first answer your question about how it's different than other types of legal reform is that people-centered justice flips their starting point for what it means to bring a case or advocate for a case, right? So it begins with, it begins with the justice. needs that people actually have in their daily lives. So as lawyers, the shift in our minds has to be, how do you, from how do we improve the supply of justice institutions to what is the gap experienced by people and what mix of like pathways can we use to close it? So for instance, at the Van Center, I, in my day-to-day practice, we work a lot with civil society organizations, our grassroots organizations. And they will bring to us a legal problem and we provide the tools to solve it, or at least try to make it better in some ways. Whereas other forms of traditional justice reform tend to start with the institutions, right? So what does the UN want to talk about in this and this, like, issue? This is different. This is from the grassroots to the top. At the Vance Center, you represent individuals before the Inter-American human rights system. and work with international advocacy mechanisms. So I'm curious, what does that look like? And even what does effective cross-border human rights advocacy look like, or what does that require from lawyers? Yeah, so I think it's built on 3 pillars, I would say. So a genuine partnership with civil society organizations or the clients, then procedural, like, fluency, and a little bit of patience combined with a sense of urgency. So I will explain these. I think for partnerships, at the Van Center, we work with grassroots civil society organizations, as I said, and our partners hold the community's trust. So we see our role, and I see my role especially as a lawyer, just to add capacity through pro bono work that we do with law firms and try to leverage our global network. So partnerships are at the center, I think, of effective cross-border advocacy because like this, you can represent your client's interests. in a way that they feel is fair and clear. Then procedural fluency, I think, is also super important for international lawyers because every regional system, UN treaty bodies, special procedures, they have their own admissibility and procedural rules. So knowing when to choose each and what to ask at each different mechanism is very important to make sure that justice is delivered for our clients. So our role is also to understand what's the strategic call at the right time. And then finally, international advocacy tends to be slow and needs to solve very urgent matters in general. So I think effective advocacy also combines the long game with the tools that deliver protection in the short term. And it's very important to be honest to clients about this because sometimes they're suffering the human rights violations at that moment, and the solution cannot come fast enough. So that's also very, very important. I saw you coordinate the Women in Prison Network, so I want to hear a little bit about that. What legal and institutional barriers do you find that maybe affect women in prison the most? Why is this kind of approach to prison reform so important? Thank you so much for your question. I always love an opportunity to talk about women in prison. The Women in Prison Network is a program we coordinate from the Van Center. We have partners in over 30 countries that all work in women in prison issues, and most are women in prison-led organizations. So women are a small minority of the global prison population, under 10%, and that percentage is usually the problem because the prison system is designed by default around men. So everything from infrastructure to health services assumes a male prisoner. So women face a lot of barriers, but for example, overuse of pretrial detention, criminalization of poverty, facilities that are far from women's families, facilities that are not, that are not adapted to women's health needs. Also, women are very often primary caregivers, so incarceration also ruptures the lives of their children. So there's a history also of violence and coercion that the criminal process like rarely sees. And after release, Stigma falls always harder on women. So a gender-sensitive approach for women in prison, which is what the Bangkok Rules, for example, require, it's recognizing that formal, the identical treatment procedures in criminal proceedings create unequal outcomes. So in our work in the network, we push for alternatives to incarceration. We document conditions in front of international mechanisms like the CEDAW Committee, and we support reintegration. So what I find really powerful about this work is that women in prison really sit at the intersection of almost every access to justice failure. So if you can make the system respond to them, you can make it more just for everyone else. I'm interested here in another aspect of your work as well. I believe right in the beginning you had mentioned a little bit about how you will help and coordinate some partnerships and this, this work among not-for-profits or nonprofit organizations, law firms, UN bodies, regional human rights institutions. I'm sure there's a lot of organizations out there trying to make this all work. And I'm curious, you know, as a lawyer, what makes these partnerships effective and maybe even where do they most often fall short? Yeah, so that's also another great question. And at the Van Santen Center, we're really trying to bridge a gap in this coordination of NGOs, firms, UN bodies. So they're effective, I would say, when there are 2 conditions. The first one is local organizations are the ones that are closer to the victims, right? And to the day-to-day agenda. So the best pro bono collaborations that I coordinate start from what a local partner actually needs, and then we match that to a firm. So again, it's this people-centered, like, spirit that it's like we take the needs that come to us from our partners. So I think that's also very important, not trying to do the opposite and imposing our partners' legal needs that they maybe don't have just to produce a beautiful document, right? And this, the second, I think, again, it's this partnership has to be based in trust between CSOs, the law firms, international NGOs, UN bodies. So we try over the years to help civil society organizations in a way that is most effective for them and what they need in front of these UN bodies, right? Because If not, there's a frustration created in trying to go to a UN body and then not getting the results that they expected or not getting a result fast enough. And so I think these are the 2 like main pillars that need to exist. But where do they fall short? I would say the, like the classic failure is when international actors arrive to countries where there are grave human rights violations with preconceived idea. They extract the information they need, they publish a document and they leave. So I think it's very, very important to listen to the client's needs. And another, I think it's a timeline. So that's why I stress the importance of being honest with the timelines with the clients, even if it's maybe not what they want to hear, and to think strategically about what the right procedure and the right mechanism is for their, their results. And I think lastly, there's a bit of a translation problem. And I mean that both literally and institutionally. So I think a big part of my job is also translating the language of international law to more understandable, easy language. And the other part is it is very useful to be culturally sensitive, speak the languages of the organizations you're working with, have a similar legal culture as well. For law students, for young lawyers who are interested in working with international law, with human rights, with access to justice, What advice would you give to them as they enter the legal market today? So I think I have 4 pieces of advice. So my first one is to build the craft before anything else. So the field of human rights has a lot of people that are very passionate about it, but I think if they want to stand out, they have to be excellent lawyers. Most people who work in this field that are extremely committed, that they will make a difference, if they're very, very good. That, drafting, paying attention to detail, working in high-pressure environments, producing high-quality work. I think for me coming to human rights from investment and commercial arbitration, I was very focused on that technical part and on the research part of it. So I think that that's, that's something that helps me every day with my job and producing high-quality work, I think does make a difference for international advocacy at the end of the day. The second is that language, language learning is a career strategy as well, because I can work equally in Spanish, English, and French. That opened every possible door for me. I think regional expertise plus language fluency makes, makes you really hard to replace, and that will always be an asset. Then my third piece of advice is participating in clinics, and if they want to go into private law first, do a lot of pro bono work. They will learn a lot through that pro bono work, and it can be extremely fulfilling while they're waiting to maybe do something else or trying doing private law first. And my last piece of advice is to find mentors, mentorship programs quickly, because the path to human rights work is nonlinear and it's really hard to navigate it alone. So it's important to get to talk to people and trying to find a mentor in that, in that path. And also to be patient with that nonlinearity of, of the path. The market is difficult. It has been difficult. It's been more difficult now, but I think people who combine that, like technical excellence, language, and a commitment will find their place. Amazing. Thank you so much for making the time to come on the show and share this. And thank you all so much for listening into today's episode. Thank you.