Comparison of legal systems
Memory or moving forward, forgiveness or righteous indignation - issues that are discussed in many parts of the world
By Peggy Kuo
Dieser Artikel auf Deutsch
Peggy Kuo.
 |
"Why would you want to go to Germany?" I heard this question repeatedly when I decided to take a break from my career as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C. and spend a year in Germany on a Bundeskanzler Scholarship. Many of my American acquaintances had a pre-conceived notion of Germany which they did not want to challenge. Some had families who were destroyed during the Nazi regime and could not forgive. Others knew Germans only through Hollywood films. I hardly knew much more myself, except that the Berlin Wall had come down, reunification had just occurred, and Germany was about to change - in a big way.
My project was to compare the American and German criminal law systems, with an emphasis on responses to racially-based violence. I watched trials, talked with prosecutors and judges, and toured the jail in Moabit where I had heard prisoners yelling out their windows to family members on the street below. I discovered that the courthouses in Berlin were not so different from those in the United States, filled with the poor and desperate. In the hallway waiting area, a Danish butter cookie tin was converted into an ashtray, full by the end of the morning session. Under their black robes, judges and lawyers often wore jeans. In police reports, German perpetrators also "exited their vehicles" instead of just getting out of the car, just like in the United States.
I spent most of my free time searching out flea markets which sprung up in the vast spaces (and tiny time gap) between condemnation and new construction. I watched absurd theater at the Volksbühne, attended debates where Christo tried to convince a sceptical public of the virtue of wrapping the Reichstag, and ate an unhealthy number of Wurst and Döner Kebabs. At that point in my life, on the brink of turning 30, I could not have found a better place than Berlin, itself on the verge of tumultuous change, eager to move on, yet uncertain what to take along and what to leave behind.
The seven months I spent in my one-room apartment in the former East Berlin - six floors above street traffic, with peeling wallpaper, rattan furniture and a black-andwhite TV set that required constant slaps to keep the volume from getting progressively louder - were some of the happiest in my life. When I returned to the United States, I found it difficult to adjust to my life as it was before I went away. For a year after I left Berlin, I would find myself casually noting in my agenda plans to go to the Ku'- damm to do some shopping. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would end up back in Europe. In 1998, I came to the Netherlands to help prosecute war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. The issues I confront in the course of my work in The Hague echo those which I contemplated in Berlin: memory and moving forward, forgiveness and righteous indignation, ethnic conflict and justice. My familiarity with the German legal system unexpectedly became a valuable tool in my dealings with colleagues. It has also enabled me, along with my experience with the American system, to contribute to the Tribunal's efforts to combine and adapt the world's major legal systems into a workable international practice.
A friend warned me when I was in Germany, "Be careful. You're becoming a citizen of the world." I have tried not to lose the specificity of place that grounds people in everyday life, nor to forget where I have come from. But thanks to the Humboldt Foundation, I found a gateway to Europe and the world.
Happy Birthday, Uncle Alex!
|
