Mark Osiel is the person who international lawyers go to when they need to legally connect the “big fish” in mass atrocities to the “small fry” who carry out their orders.
The UI law professor has served as an adviser for the prosecution of former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet and perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide.
“Usually, there is no evidence of direct orders flowing through a chain of command,” he said. “Leaders are too smart to let that happen.”
But the task that makes Osiel a commodity in the international law community is famously difficult to accomplish.
When asked to help with a case, he looks through the details and tries to discern what level of autonomy the small fry have in carrying out the big fish’s orders, among other things.
But he is not focused on simply prosecuting coordinators of mass atrocities. Rather, he tries to provide a realistic assessment of what they can be held accountable for, which, he said, varies greatly case by case.
“The devil is in the details,” said Osiel, who speaks cautiously yet clearly on the legal parameters of international law in a globalizing world. “It is the tension between what we all have in common as the members of the human species and the particularities between different groups that make us different. International law has to deal with that tension.”
Sitting in his Boyd Law Building office overlooking the Iowa River, Osiel’s most prominent features seem rigid: his peppery black hair, his rimless rectangular glasses.
The professor’s interest in the international community began decades ago — first as a youth during the Vietnam War and then on a trip to Spain as a high-school student.
“Living in [Francisco] Franco’s Spain gave me an interesting lesson in repression by states,” he said, drawing connections between demostration suppression there and that he observed in Iran.
Osiel graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 1987 with a J.D. and a Ph.D. in sociology.
The now-54 year old was hired as an attorney, taught for two years at Tulane University, then joined the UI in 1994. He most recently returned from a yearlong trip to The Hague, Netherlands, where he advised the International Criminal Court.
“He has a reputation of being a respected intellectual,” said colleague and UI law lecturer Nicholas Johnson.
Honored with advising the International Criminal Court, he said, one of the most troubling details he has with the judicial body is its founding ideal. The court’s logic is that international tribunals will cause reconciliation within countries.
But Osiel said the evidence doesn’t support this idea.
“It is sometimes better to come to terms with [the country’s] past through domestic processes than international ones, requiring the perpetrator to disclose what he did in exchange for immunity,” he said. “The country can heal itself if the truth is known rather than to hold individual people accountable.”
