Gina Amato and Katherine Fleet were already in Washington, D.C., last October to argue before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights when they received word that the Dominican government had replied to their brief. The reply was the latest wrinkle in an effort to persuade the commission to pressure the Dominican Republic to end discriminatory policies against people of Haitian descent.

In addition to their work representing international victims of human rights abuses, Amato and Fleet are students at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). They had traveled to Washington to argue before the commission, a division of the Organization of American States. Now they would have to quickly weigh the Dominican government’s response and determine their next course of action.

How did these law students in California end up representing two young girls more than 3,500 miles away? Both Amato, a third-year law/public policy student, and Fleet, a second-year student, are interns with Boalt Hall’s International Human Rights Law Clinic. Shortly after it opened in January 1998, the clinic received a request from human rights activists to investigate the expulsion of resident Haitians from the Dominican Republic.

In response, a team including clinic students, associate director Laurel Fletcher, and a San Francisco human rights activist visited the country that March. While expulsion was an issue, Fletcher says that Haitians living in the Dominican Republic "were more concerned that their children were being denied access to education, locking them into a cycle of poverty."

Fleet and Amato got involved at the end of the 1998-99 academic year. Fleet spent last summer in the Dominican Republic gathering evidence of these abuses with the help of fellowships from the UC-Berkeley Human Rights Center and the Center for Latin American Studies. Meanwhile, Amato provided her with technical support from the law school.

In the Dominican Republic, Fleet worked with a local lawyer affiliated with the Movement of Dominican-Haitian Women. Together they found two girls, aged 3 and 14, who would become the clinic’s clients. Both girls had been denied access to state facilities and services. The older girl had been expelled from school the previous year because she didn’t have a birth certificate.

While there, Fleet observed the prevalence of human rights abuses.

"I would go to meetings with my Dominican counterpart and no one would have a pen and paper," Fleet says, recalling her initial surprise that stories of human rights abuses went undocumented. She began to understand why after realizing that these violations were not punished. "Why would you document it if there’s nothing you can do about it?"

Returning to the United States, Fleet set to work "translating human conversation into legal discourse." The resulting documentation—developed by Fleet, Amato, and the clinic’s co-counsel, the Center for Justice and International Law in Washington—was presented to the commission last August. On the strength of that evidence, the commission issued an emergency injunction directing the Dominican Republic to enroll the clinic’s 14-year-old client in school.

"There’s no police department to enforce the commission’s orders," Fleet says, noting that nevertheless its decisions carry weight in the Latin American community. "But we have been very lucky that the Dominican government has responded well to the commission’s recommendations."

Although the Dominican government honored the commission’s request to enroll the girl in school, the order was valid for only six months. To make the injunction permanent and to get other relief relating to the right to nationality and the freedom of movement, Amato and Fleet needed to plead their case yet again. Thus, they returned to Washington in October. Urged on by the commission, the two sides have since engaged in settlement discussions that could lead to fairer treatment for the clinic’s clients and others like them.

"These are not pretend problems," Fletcher says. "[These students] are acting as international lawyers act." •

Kurt Mullen