Hume ’02 represents detainees

Karen Sharpe

Elizabeth Hume ’02 has spent the last three years at Fordham University learning how to be a lawyer. None of her studies, however, fully prepared her for the challenges she now faces as an intern in Fordham’s International Justice Clinic, where she is representing men detained by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Perhaps the largest hurdle is one handed down by the government, which prohibits legal interns to travel to Guantanamo Bay: Hume has never met or spoken to her client. Further complicating her work is the government’s lack of clarity about which laws apply to the detainees’ situation.

“Even a task as simple as determining the deadline for filing a motion is complicated, as no set of federal procedural rules seems to fit Guantanamo litigation,” Hume says.

A Russian major, Hume became interested in law and prisoners’ rights during her junior year abroad, which she spent in St. Petersburg, Russia. While there she visited the cramped and dirty Kresty Prison, where the average prisoner spends two years behind bars before going to trial.

“Prior to that experience, I guess I had taken our legal system and American principles of justice for granted,” Hume says. “Russia’s unfair laws made me realize that justice is something we have to fight to uphold.”

Hume feels the Guantanamo detainees—who have yet to be charged with any crimes—are being held in a “jurisdictional void” so the United States can act outside of any confines of law in regard to their treatment and the application of justice.

“My time at Holy Cross definitely fostered my interest in serving the poor, forgotten and voiceless among us,” Hume says. “The Jesuit tenet of ‘men and women for and with others’ was a consistent theme during my years on The Hill, and I find a similar commitment to social justice in both the students and faculty at Fordham Law.”

Hume, who will graduate this year, intends to practice law in the areas of prisoners’ rights, criminal defense and human rights advocacy.