AUSTIN, Texas—Three students at the University of Texas School of Law have been selected by the United Nation’s criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda to serve as interns on their prosecutorial staffs.
Roberta Ritvo will work for three months this summer at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, located in Arusha, Tanzania, while Ameer Gopalani and Andrew Keller will work for six months at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. All are second-year students, with extensive backgrounds in international law, who were nominated by the School of Law after an internal selection process.
The law school already has sent five interns to the Yugoslavia Tribunal since 1997 and is among a handful of law schools in the United States to have two students selected for internships at one time. This year will mark the first time that the law school has sent a student to the Rwanda Tribunal. The internship program was established by Professor Steven Ratner, a human rights scholar, who was approached with the idea in 1996 by an alumnus working as a senior prosecutor at the Yugoslavia Tribunal.
The Yugoslavia Tribunal was created by the UN Security Council in 1993 to try people responsible for war crimes arising out of the breakup of Yugoslavia; the Rwanda Tribunal, created in 1994, addresses the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The Rwanda Tribunal has convicted several leaders of the 1994 massacres, and the Yugoslavia Tribunal has lately detained a number of leading suspects as well. Both are staffed by international civil servants from many countries.
