Human rights play starring role in World on Trial filming

The Apfelbaum Family Courtroom was crowded with cameras, equipment, and people from several continents while five Penn State jurors awaited opening statements for the pilot episode of World on Trial. 

In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted without a single dissenting vote. It was the first time in human history that a set of individual human rights were recognized and internationally agreed upon, explained the host of World on Trial,  renowned human rights advocate and Penn State Law Professor, Randall Robinson, who also conceived the series. 

"Have nations that agreed to be bound by these laws obeyed these laws?” he asked. “We have exempted no nation from scrutiny.” Professor Robinson was instrumental to ending Apartheid in South Africa. As host of this program, he will later put other nations on trial, rich and poor, big and small. He said that future episodes will try the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Sri Lanka, among other nations.

After a welcome from the judge and a brief documentary video on the case at hand, famed trial attorney and Harvard professor Charles Ogletree stood before the judge and took a breath.

“May it please the court,” he said.

“CUT!”

He broke into a smile, and a few people chuckled. He was not supposed to be standing.

The guest judge is renowned barrister Cherie Booth QC, who is also the wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. “I was intrigued by the whole idea of this series of judging nations by the covenants they sign up to, what they do in practice, and in particular I was interested as a feminist and a person of faith,” she later said. She wedged her trip to Penn State amid her obligations as a mediator, arbitrator, and part-time judge. 

Televised, fictional proceedings focused on a real issue: whether France’s 2004 ban on headscarves in public schools violates international human rights law. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) enumerates an individual right to “freedom of thought, conscience and religion." UDHR goes on to state "this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

The Arguments

French avocat Remy Schwartz claimed that the law protects Muslim girls from family pressure to wear a headscarf in school. He emphasized that the French legal system values secularism. “This is not a real issue today in France because no one contests the need for this rule in public school,” he said through a translator.

“Prosecution” witness John R. Bowen, the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor of Arts and Sciences at Washington University, St. Louis, is a sociologist who has studied France in great depth and authored two books on the relationship between France and Islam. “No one can show that putting on a headscarf causes violence,” he testified. He said the law is about “opposing Islam by picking on an easy target." He said that the ban has harmed many Muslim girls who wish to cover their faces during school hours. 

Karima Bennoune explained that the headscarf ban protects girls by giving them a good reason not to wear a veil in public school. “Not being veiled has caused violence,” she said. “But the offense of not being veiled is only possible in the presence of veiling.” Bennoune is a scholar of international law and a professor of law and the Arthur L. Dickson Scholar at Rutgers School of Law in Newark.

Attorneys did not object to one another's questions or an occasional instance of witness speculation. "We attempted to preserve the essence of trial by jury without burdening the proceedings with all the technical requirements that might apply in the real world,” said Penn State Law Professor Gary Gildin, who teaches trial advocacy and helped create the program. 

In closing arguments, Professor Ogletree asked jurors to think of Muslim girls as the minority and to protect the vulnerable. "Think about what this law represents. We're saying 'don't single out Muslim girls when everybody should be treated equally." Schwartz' closing argument was blunt. He said that the 2004 law banning ostentatious religious attire in public schools was the result of years of careful society-wide debate, not France suddenly losing its senses.