1997 Ad

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 24, 1997 by John L. Allen, Jr.

A professor and a third-year law student at a Catholic university in Texas played key roles in drafting the international treaty banning land mines whose sponsors recently won the Nobel Peace Prize. The two see the anti-land mine campaign as an exemplar for grassroots efforts to promote social justice and human rights.

"The Nobel was awarded in part to the campaign itself," said Monica Schurtman, a professor of law at St. Mary's University in San Antonio.

"It's the first time the peace prize went to an informal coalition, and I hope that it establishes a model for people to follow," she said. "It's the most successful human rights and disarmament campaign in history -- and it happened because people wanted it, not because of action from governments or diplomats."

The prize, announced Oct. 10, was awarded to the International Campaign Ban Landmines and to its coordinator, Jody Williams of Putney, Vt.

In December representatives of more than 100 countries will meet in Ottawa to sign a treaty banning land mines. The United States, however, will not be among the signers. After the prize was announced, President Clinton stood firm in opposing the treaty, saying that land mines are necessary to protect U.S. troops, particularly those on the Korean peninsula.

Members of the Nobel committee said it hoped, with the award, to influence countries to sign the treaty and said it also intended the award to celebrate the effectiveness of grassroots citizen action to bring about change in the world.

"The revolutionary thing about this effort is that there were more than 1,000 groups all over the world involved," said Audrey Carr, the student who assisted in developing the treaty. "Small groups, without much impact in themselves, built a network that accomplished what many people saw as impossible." Carr will receive her law degree from St. Mary's in December.

Based on Schurtman's experience as counsel to the Arms Project of Human Rights Watch in New York, the land mines coalition presented her and Carr last year with draft treaties from American, Belgian and Austrian sources. Carr -- who has a background in international law drawn from her work with the United Nations Development Fund in Africa where she grew up -- and Schurtman went through the drafts line by line, making the language more precise and closing potential legal loopholes. The two developed the legal rationale for the land mines ban and the language implementing it.

Their work became the basis of the final version of the treaty. "A good chunk" of the land mines treaty negotiated in Oslo, Norway, in September was written by the St. Mary's duo, Schurtman said. "It looks a lot like what Audrey and I drafted."

Over the last two years, St. Mary's has worked to carve out an academic niche for itself in the area of social justice, establishing a Center for Legal and Social Justice at the law school. The center brings together formerly disparate programs in human rights, immigrant rights, social justice and criminal justice.

Schurtman became involved in the land mines issue in 1994 when she was asked to develop language for a treaty to be debated at a United Nations conference. Activists were dissatisfied with what they saw as the "watered-down" final version of that document and began work on a different treaty that would proceed outside conventional diplomatic channels. That agreement calls for a total ban on the production, sale, use and stockpiling of land mines.

In the wake of the Peace Prize, a land mines ban may seem obvious and even inevitable, but just two years ago it struck many as quixotic. Schurtman herself wrote in a Harvard International Law Journal article that the campaign "has not gathered significant momentum among states, either because they consider it unrealistic or because of opposition from their own militaries." By late 1996, however, nations were stumbling over one another in the rush to sign on. What happened?

Schurtman sees three factors at work. First is the "concerted attention the groups involved gave to educating the public," she said. As the campaign intensified, advocacy groups were able to enlist the media to spread their message. Newspapers took up the cause, and the land mine issue became a favorite of editorial writers.

Second, the campaign united an unusual and fascinating coalition of viewpoints. For human rights activists, pictures of children missing arms and legs were enough to compel them to sign on. For people interested in Third World development, "we were able to calculate the cost of land mines," Schurtman said. "We could quantify the cost of fields going unused rather than growing crops, and of medical expenses" of land mine victims, she said.

Perhaps most important for military leaders, the campaign could show the deaths and injuries land mines cause to soldiers -- and, more often than not, to soldiers on the side of the country using the land mines. For example, Schurtman established that land mines were the leading cause of death for U.S. troops in Vietnam.