WESTMINSTER — Patricia Whalen has had some hefty titles in her career.
Justice at the International Criminal Tribunal for Bosnia.
Official Representative to the Hague Conference on Private International Law for the International Association of Women Judges.
Vermont Project Director of the Afghan Women Judges Judicial Education Project.
Founder of the Rural Women Leadership Institute of Vermont.
Those are some pretty hefty titles for anyone.
For Whalen, a Westminster resident, the bridge to her work with the War Crimes Chamber in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2007 began years ago before law school and her subsequent work with child support in Vermont.
Whalen began her work with women and children because of a pre-law-school experience with a neighbor who had been severely abused by her husband, so much so that she lost the child she was carrying.
In an alumni profile on the website of the Vermont Law School, where she earned her law degree in 1979, she described what followed.
“While I was with her at the hospital, he shot himself in the foot, and she got off her gurney to take care of him,” she said. “That one night taught me everything I needed to know about domestic violence.”
Deciding that she wanted to change a system she believed provided neither justice nor recourse, Whalen began attending law school part time.
In a 2010 conference at Cornell Law School, Whalen also recounted working three days a week at the former Women's Crisis Center, now the Women's Freedom Center, in Brattleboro, which she helped start “with a bunch of other friends and women” in the area.
She did not want to attend school full time. Her studies took longer, but the work was important to her, she told the Cornell students.
During graduate law school at Vermont Law School, Whalen said she earned a Reginald Heber Smith fellowship to study battered women's issues. Her research led to her wanting to work for Vermont Legal Aid.
Judges mentoring her at the time told her, “If you work for Legal Aid, you will get nowhere,” but she knew that it was “everything I wanted to do. I wanted to work with women and children and low income families.”
A pink-collar appointment
When Madeleine Kunin, the first and to date the only female governor of Vermont, won office in 1985, Whalen described, “she dramatically changed the face of the Vermont judiciary by appointing women, and women from nontraditional backgrounds.”
Largely because of her academic interests, her background at Vermont Legal Aid, and her experience working to support battered women, Whalen earned one of those appointments, as a Family Court magistrate in 1990.
Whalen said that Family Court was considered a “pink collar” job that nobody with career aspirations would want.
“Women's issues weren't anything anyone cared about” back then, she said.
“I didn't follow any traditional track, but I did follow my heart,” she said, “You can't separate your career from who you are as a woman.”
In that spirit, Whalen began working under a new national statute that created new child-care guidelines.
“Much of what we did setting up the child support system was pretty interesting work,” she said.
Meanwhile, a decision to care for her ailing parents required more of her time, so the state Supreme Court and the Legislature agreed to create a “job-share judicial position,” reasoning, she said, that the state would be getting a good deal having two people sharing one judgeship.
Whalen said that after her parents died, she found she had more time to pursue other interests, and she began working with the International Association of Women Judges through her friend, former Vermont District Court Judge Shireen Fisher.
The two worked on projects internationally, a collaboration made possible by her part-time schedule, which “ended up opening up a whole new opportunity.”
In 2002, Fisher asked Whalen to help draft The Hague Maintenance Convention.
The international treaty centered “on child support and maintenance,” Whalen said. “Working on a Hague treaty, you learn about other legal systems [and] delivery of law in an adversarial system, and you learn how to harmonize these [civil and adversarial law systems] between nations.”
Splitting time between Vermont and The Hague in the Netherlands, Whalen's work began to get noticed.
She told the Cornell students, “If you were a woman judge and from the state of Vermont, it was an automatic in. Maybe they were thinking, 'Wow, that's amazing - all these women judges from Vermont. If you are from Vermont, you must be good.'”
Whalen said she and Fisher, the second woman to be appointed to the Vermont judiciary, really enjoyed working together and “embarked on a five-year treaty process, then I was subsequently appointed to work on a review process of a parental abduction treaty.
“With Judge Fisher working on international criminal law and appointed to the court in Bosnia, she encouraged me to apply,” she said.
“At the same time, I was recommended to the Bosnian court by the [Hague Conference on Private International Law] head, J.H.A. Hans Von Loon, because of the work we did harmonizing civil and common law codes so that implementation of any treaty could be implemented in both systems” of national and international law,” she said.
Judging war crimes
Whalen was appointed in 2007 to the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina War Crimes Tribunal in Sarajevo.
“To be honest, the system of how cases in these courts [are adjudicated] is more similar to family than criminal courts,” Whalen said. “It was not a difficult transition.”
Of the court proceedings, evidence, and findings themselves, Whalen said everything was in English and translated simultaneously.
And how does family court tie in with genocide?
“The thing that's interesting to me in family court is you have good people [who] once loved one another doing unspeakable harm to one another,” Whalen said. “That's exactly what happens in war - neighbors who liked each other previously are doing unspeakable evil to one another.
“Plus, the system of how cases are heard in these courts is more similar to family court than criminal courts,” she added.
All the war crimes cases she heard came out of the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 and 1995. The conflict was mainly among three groups: the Bosnian Serbs, who are Orthodox Christian; the Bosniaks, who are Muslim; and the Bosnian Croats, who are Catholic.
One case that Whalen tried was that of Novak Djukic, a Bosnian Serb general involved in shelling the town of Tuzla on the evening of May 25, 1995, and convicted of war crimes against civilians.
She said Tuzla was a protected area that was primarily Muslim, with some Serbs and Croats living there.
“It was National Youth Day, a day when young people traditionally gathered in the square to celebrate. It had been raining for two weeks straight, but on this beautiful spring evening, more people than usual were in the square,” she said.
“The court found that [Djukic] issued a direct order on a direct target which was civilian and in a protected area. There was no military target,” Whalen said.
Seventy-one people were killed, and more than 200 were wounded. All were civilians and nearly all were children. It was the largest death toll from a single shelling in the history of the Bosnian civil war.
“I believe in accountability, and I think these crimes are enormous crimes,” Whalen said.
The other significant case she was involved with was the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, when more than 8,000 Bosniaks, mainly young men and boys, were killed by Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic.
Another 25,000 to 30,000 Bosniak women, children, and elderly were forcibly relocated during the massacre. It was murder and suffering on a scale not seen in Europe since the Holocaust.
In February 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concurred with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) judgment, finding “specific intent to destroy in part the group of the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina” and declaring the atrocities “acts of genocide.”
“Genocide is a crime that just strips us of all our humanity,” said Whalen. “It's very difficult to contemplate that people can do that to one another.
“A rule of law demands that there is investigation and accountability and I think [that is] what is being demanded by most concerned people,” she said. “That civilians can be targeted and shelled, we can all agree that at the end of the day these crimes might reach definition of war crimes.”
Echoes of Bosnia
Whalen sees echoes of what happened in Bosnia in the current civil war in Syria.
“We should be looking at these issues and our behaviors,” she said. “I think most people turn their TV on and look at what's taking place in Syria, and regardless of who is responsible, most people want it to stop.
“I think that when we talk about tolerance and diversity, they are not just personality aspects. If we do not integrate true tolerance and diversity into ourselves as humans, I fear for us.
“We should be better than we are, I think. I understand our tendency to blame the other for our problems in any environment where there are injustices in those who have and have not.
“All of that is true,” she said. “But I think each day of our life you have to live with purpose. We all have to pay attention to the words coming out of our mouth and how we live.”
In spite of the horrors of the Bosnian civil war, which over three years left approximately 110,000 dead and 2.2 million displaced, Whalen said she was struck by “the wonderful sense of humor” of the Bosnians.
“How they have survived, in part, is through sharing humor,” she said. “I've seen instances of forgiveness and reconciliation and true human kindnesses. For every ugly thing, fortunately there was also something incredible.
“The war isn't really over here,” she said, speaking from Bosnia. “The fighting has stopped and the killing has stopped, but it's a country that still has issues to work through.”
Whalen noted that some 6,000 Bosnians who escaped during the war now live in northern Vermont, so there are “a lot of people [who] still care quite a bit” about what is happening in Bosnia.
“We all have a responsibility,” she said.
“The thing about being back [in Vermont in November] is we have just a wonderful community,” she said. “Although the one thing I have learned is we can't take it for granted.”
“With human rights, you have to be vigilant,” she said. “And, however we live our life and how we raise our children, we also have to laugh.”