The Power of Persuasion
Karen Tse | Legal Rights Activist
It was 2001, and Karen Tse had just founded a human-rights group that so far consisted of a name, a business card, and a staff of one: herself. The man she was flying across the world to see, a Chinese government official, was her only contact in the country she wanted to serve. So when he suddenly canceled, she was desperate. "He was my only choice," she says. "I had to get in." So she begged his assistant to reconsider and was allotted 15 minutes.
Nobody who has spent 15 minutes with Tse would be surprised to learn that this was all it took to win her a full dinner date, then a meeting, and finally a business agreement. "I don't know why," the official, Gong Xiaobing, told Tse. "But I'm going to work with you." He was not the first person to be won over by Tse's charms--and he wouldn't be the last.
Ending torture. Vivacious, positive, and above all persistent, Tse is the director of International Bridges to Justice, a Geneva-based organization that trains public defenders and raises awareness of criminal rights in countries that have only just acknowledged them. With a staff of 21 and a budget of just under $1 million, the organization has trained hundreds of defense lawyers in the 31 provinces of China, as well as in Cambodia and Vietnam. Thanks to Tse's efforts, posters in Chinese police stations that used to say, "Resist punishment: confess [for] better treatment," now read: "You have a right not to be tortured."
The end of China's Cultural Revolution and the onset of rapid economic growth brought accelerated demands for improved human rights, and in the 1980s, a slew of new laws granted those protections. Yet today, enforcement is spotty at best. In 2005, for instance, the Chinese government reported 87,000 riots; left out of the modernization, millions have taken to the streets. But during the same time, only 20 percent to 30 percent of accused criminals had a lawyer. And the few who did found their attorneys prevented from providing the most basic services: meeting with their clients, collecting evidence, and interrogating witnesses. Even defense lawyers themselves, seen as enemies of the government, have been detained, indicted, or tortured.
So in February 2002, when Tse walked into the office of one of the foremost American experts on Chinese law and announced that she wanted to improve the country's criminal justice system, it's no wonder he balked. "I thought, here's a cute little girl, very nice, with this way-out idea," says Jerome Cohen, a law professor at New York University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "She'll never get to first base." But Cohen, who taught his students about China's dysfunctional system, had also urged them to fix it. "They told us to, as lawyers, use your skills, use your training, to do meaningful change," says IBJ Board President Francis James, who studied law with Tse.
Tse had already taken similar advice seriously. Even as a child, the daughter of an immigrant dentist in Los Angeles's Chinatown, Tse was plagued by nightmares of human-rights abuses. In college, she wrote letters demanding fair trials for political dissidents. Then she studied to become a public defender at UCLA's law school. In 1994, after several years working in San Francisco, Tse went to Cambodia to train a new generation of lawyers in the devastation created by the Khmer Rouge. But fewer than 10 attorneys had survived the murderous regime, and neither Tse nor her colleagues spoke Khmer. It would be an uphill battle--and a transformative one.
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