Barbara Johnston
Diane Desierto spends a lot of time thinking about dictators and autocratic regimes. Her life’s work focuses on fighting the global spread of authoritarianism.
“The thing we should be concerned about is how ‘human rights’ has been co-opted by the dictators and the authoritarians and distorted,” says Desierto, a professor of law and global affairs, faculty director of the Notre Dame Law School’s master’s degree program in international human rights law and director of its new Global Human Rights Clinic.
“This is not the 1950s to the 1960s, when dictators would openly reject human rights and the applicability of international law or the international systems,” she says.
Instead, they present themselves as embracing those concepts. “A lot of authoritarian countries are members of the Human Rights Council, the highest governing body in the United Nations” — China is a current member — and authoritarians seek to portray “human rights” as a plural concept. “It’s your truth versus my truth,” she says.
Desierto is a native of the Philippines and grew up in the aftermath of the dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos Sr., whose 21-year tenure ended in 1986. She is the youngest of 11 siblings and half-siblings in a devout Catholic family. Her parents are both attorneys born and raised on Cebu, the island where in 1521 Catholicism first arrived in what is today an archipelagic nation of more than 110 million people.
As an economics major at the University of the Philippines, Desierto was set to pursue a doctorate and work in development economics when her life plan changed abruptly.
One day during her senior year, she went to lunch at a barbecue shack in a poor neighborhood where she witnessed forced evictions. “There was a guy with a steamroller who was demolishing all of the houses, the shanties that were there. He kept waving a piece of paper [a court order] as if it mattered,” she recalls. Parents were pulling their children to safety and crying because their few material possessions were being destroyed.
Desierto was jarred by the experience. She discussed it with her mother, who was the first person in her village to become an attorney, specializing in cases backing land use reform and housing for the urban poor.
“I was used to thinking that the biggest challenge of our time was how to solve poverty and how to ensure that everybody had their just needs met. But looking at it from my mother’s lens, I realized it wasn’t about how to solve poverty,” Desierto says. “It was actually how to prevent the abuses that enable poverty to exist to begin with.”
Desierto earned a law degree at the University of the Philippines, then master and doctor of law degrees at Yale. She clerked at the International Court of Justice and has taught around the world, including the Philippines, China, Hawaii, Paris and Berlin.
‘My preoccupation is always with the outcome. It’s not just about vindication. If there is no human rights outcome, then the human who’s supposed to be the object of protection of a right really is worse off.’
“I became a lawyer to achieve human rights ends, but drawing exclusively on human rights law is not the only path for it,” says Desierto, who holds a joint appointment in the Keough School of Global Affairs. The theme in all her work is “how to achieve the human rights goal in whichever sphere it is, whether it’s private law or public law or international law.”
An early case she worked on sought redress from the Japanese government for atrocities committed against the so-called comfort women of the Philippines who were forced into sexual slavery during World War II. The petitioners were required to show they had exhausted all remedies within the Philippine legal system, but that nation’s Supreme Court held on to the petition for nearly eight years before dismissing it. A UN committee later ruled that the women’s rights had been violated and they were entitled to full reparations, but by that time many of the elderly petitioners had died.
“That’s why my preoccupation is always with the outcome,” Desierto says. “It’s not just about vindication. If there is no human rights outcome, then the human who’s supposed to be the object of protection of a right really is worse off.”
She also represents journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa, who was arrested for cyber libel during the term of authoritarian Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte. Desierto is preparing for oral arguments in that case before the Supreme Court of the Philippines.
Leaders of autocratic nations don’t want any form of international accountability. Instead they encourage plaintiffs to go to local courts. “But if the local courts are also installed by dictators who are in power, then there’s no real redress,” Desierto says.
Courts in many nations don’t resemble the legal system of the United States, she notes. “They don’t assassinate adverse parties in the U.S. Judges are not killed in broad daylight, and neither are they bribed. Neither is it a norm that cases will be delayed indefinitely.”
For many victims of human rights abuses, their last and only real resort is the international system. “When you’ve got the dictators also trying to co-opt the international system with their version of human rights, it’s a real problem,” she says.
As director of the Global Human Rights Clinic, she works to create bonds between human rights defenders around the world. The clinic is the hands-on learning unit for students in the law school’s master’s degree program in international human rights law, which has existed for a half-century and enrolls 15 to 20 students in a typical year.
Many law schools have human-rights clinics that file amicus briefs, but not all provide representation. Notre Dame’s clinic does. “Our students get to meet the client, get to accompany the client, get to understand the client, get to work on things from start to finish,” she says.
The clinic already is handling 15 cases. One concerns Russia’s banning the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine and the detention of two priests. (The clinic helped secure the priests' release on June 28.) Another involves representing Jesuits in Nicaragua after that religious order was declared a terrorist organization and its assets seized on the command of dictator Daniel Ortega.
Clinic attorneys went to Barbados in April for an Inter-American Court of Human Rights public hearing on climate change and its impact on human-rights obligations. The clinic also represents Ressa and the International Center for Journalists, seeking remedies for female journalists around the world who are targeted online and suffer offline harassment and threats.
Notre Dame law, graduate and undergraduate students are involved in the cases at every level.
The pursuit of human rights isn’t a task just for attorneys, Desierto says, because every human being is an agent for human rights work. “That begins with a conscience, first and foremost,” she says. “It begins with loving the human.”
How does Desierto take on a constant stream of such challenging cases without feeling discouraged?
There has to be an integrity and a unity in how we live our lives and what causes we choose to support, she says. “I am fundamentally a very optimistic person. . . . I am my parents’ daughter. They always taught me the work has to not just glorify God, it should be of God.”
Margaret Fosmoe is an associate editor of this magazine.