Toni Holness
Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

My internship with the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project (“PILP”) has afforded me a depth and breadth of insight into Prison Rights. My interest in PILP’s work actually emerged last summer, while I was working in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. That experience opened my eyes to countless human rights abuses suffered by Cambodians at the hands of their former communist government, the Khmer Rouge. Arguably, the most egregious of these offenses were executed against prisoners of the notorious S-21 torture prison. At the close of my internship in Cambodia, I mulled over the prevalence of prison abuses abroad and dared to consider what abuses occur here in our own U.S. prisons. Furthermore, how do international prisoner rights treaties and standards interact with domestic prisoner rights jurisprudence?

Within moments of arriving at PILP, it became clear that PILP was the ideal setting for exploring these concerns. PILP’s mission of serving the indigent institutionalized population of Pennsylvania includes serving immigration detainees. To this end, my supervising attorney represented Mr. Abdul (not his actual name), a detained refugee from Western Sahara. Western Sahara is an expanse of desert, currently occupied by Morocco. Mr. Abdul’s support for the independence of Western Sahara exposed him to numerous human rights abuses at the hands of Moroccan occupying forces. In an effort to escape the torture he experienced as a political prisoner, Mr. Abdul traveled to the U.S. as a stowaway. With PILP’s assistance, Mr. Abdul was eventually awarded refugee status. Unfortunately, despite PILP’s successful advocacy for Mr. Abdul’s refugee status, his lawful stay in the U.S. was being threatened by a series of minor offenses, including the theft of less than $7.00 worth of cheese.

Years after escaping unlawful detention and inhumane treatment in Western Sahara, Mr. Abdul was again struggling for his freedom, but this time he was being detained by the very country that granted him refuge from his persecutors. Only a few weeks into my internship, my supervising attorney trusted me with the task of calling on a diverse team of attorneys, academics and activists to support Mr. Abdul’s petition for withholding of removal. This ad hoc team of professors, researchers, activists and attorneys fortified Mr. Abdul’s petition with a wealth of information regarding the dire human rights record of the occupied Western Sahara. They also provided expert testimony as to the persecution Mr. Abdul would face if returned to the region. PILP’s decision to reach beyond the legal community to enlist the expertise of these academics and activists was handsomely rewarded with a judgment in favor of Mr. Abdul, barring the immigration authorities from returning him to the hands of his persecutors.

In addition to recruiting a comprehensive team of experts, my supervising attorney astutely called on the immigration judge to consider both international human rights norms, such as the Convention against Torture, as well as the international community’s opinion on the state of Western Sahara. In this respect, many of the international human rights instruments I witnessed at work in Cambodia were again being used to further human rights in the domestic arena.

The opportunity to support PILP’s advocacy on behalf of Mr. Abdul has allowed me to experience the myriad of benefits that spring from collaborative lawyering as well as the advantages of incorporating international legal norms into domestic advocacy.