NLJ: What kinds of projects are you doing right now?
CS: At any given time, we have one or more trial advocacy programs going on. We will train a combination of lawyers and judges, separately. We teach them the process of trying human trafficking cases, domestic violence cases or criminal cases. Frequently, they just don’t have the experience to deal with the nuance of those types of cases. For example, they might not know how to interrogate a child on the stand. We’ve done two of those in Kenya and one in Liberia, and we want to bring it to Ethiopia. One of the other things we do is court trial observations. I believe we are the only neutral, bound-to-confidentiality program operating. We don’t make our findings available to the press. We share the finding with the government [where the observation took place], with the agreement that we will go back to the country to train their lawyers and judges. We just finished a two-year trial observation in Ethiopia. We’re not there for the plaintiff or the defendant. We’re there to protect the integrity of the process.
