SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Beat the Prosecution, presented by Northern Virginia criminal defense and DUI lawyer Jonathan Katz, where we are here to regularly present you information and ideas for beating your prosecution as best as possible. Nothing on any of our media sources, such as our podcast or website, is legal advice. John Katz only provides legal advice to current clients or for individuals who have paid for a consultation. And now for your host, John Katz.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Hello, everybody. This is John Katz at Beat the Prosecution. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer in Fairfax, Northern Virginia. I am absolutely delighted to have today's guest. I'll let him tell you his full name if he wants. I know him as Abby Williams. I don't think I've spoken to him orally in over 40 years. We've emailed. He is a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy over at Tufts University. We met when I was an undergrad there in the 1980s, and uh I don't know if he was stunned that I remembered so much about our talk. I said to him, uh, okay, so you're from Sierra Leone. Uh isn't that the place that uh had the first self-adhesive postage stamp? I said, I think I'm right. He said, Yes, you're right. Don't take that from us. But one of the things that really struck me during our talk was I was telling him about all the things I don't know and that I think I need to know, and he summed it down to two words information overload. And since then, I have learned the power of zero in the practice of law in fighting in life, which is that less is more, get rid of the gunk. Here he is, Abby Williams. Please introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_02 1:51

Well, John, thank you very much for that introduction. It's really so nice to see you again after so many years. And when I got your email, I was absolutely stunned, as you say, uh, because I was amazed that you could remember our conversation uh in the Fletcher dining room from so many years ago. Um, I'm back at our Alma Mata, Professor of the Practice of International Policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. I also have the opportunity of teaching courses for both graduate and undergraduate students. And before that, I had a well, I've had a career in three worlds, in academia, in the United Nations, and in think tanks, and I've been fortunate to serve in different places in Boston, in Washington, DC, in New York, in the United States, and then overseas serving in Skopje and Port-au-Prince and uh Sarajevo. So it's been an interesting uh career in different places and working for very different organizations, as different as Tufts and Georgetown University, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, as it was called, at the UN, and of course serving for two secretaries general at the UN, Kofianan and Banakimun.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

We're going to cover all that, and uh, Abby, uh, selfishly, as with so many of my guests, I have you here because I just wanted to catch up with you. Uh, but for our audience, the relevance of talking with Abby is that the practice of criminal defense is about dealing with conflict, tension. You have to be ready to negotiate a settlement before you go to trial, even if the negotiation is just seeking a dismissal. And Abby's been involved with that. And I already told you about this thing about the less is more uh aspect, which is just uh so important to me. Uh Abby, what was your progression um after you uh you graduated from the Fletcher School when? And and where did you go from there?

SPEAKER_02 4:17

Well, I first did my mold, I think that's when we met, the Fletcher Iconic degree, which is the Master of Arts in International Law and Diplomacy, and then I continued with my PhD in international relations. And then I was fortunate I had a visiting uh professorship at the University of Rochester in New York, which I was there for a year, but I knew that I would really prefer to teach at a professional school of international affairs like the Fletcher School, and had this wonderful opportunity to join the faculty of the School of Foreign Service, the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. So I taught courses on international relations, international uh organizations, and then of course took the opportunity to start my own research and writing. And after a number of years at Georgetown, I got the itch to go out into the world of practice. You will remember that I had two loves, even as an undergrad, even as a graduate student, which was academia, and then the United Nations. And in the early 90s, mid-1990s, the world was changing after the uh end of the Cold War, and we had this uh tremendous growth in peacekeeping operations. And I felt that, you know, I had studied the UN, had been writing about the UN, had done my PhD dissertation on the UN, but I wanted to go out into the field to find out whether what had been teaching the students was actually true and to have that practical experience. So I went out to former Yugoslavia, which was then breaking up, and was first posted to what is now North Macedonia. And what was very interesting about that particular mission, it is the first and so far the only preventive peacekeeping operation which the United Nations has ever mounted. And that mission was deployed to help North Macedonia, uh, which of course historically has always been at the sort of crossroads of conflict in the Southern Balkans. So we were there trying to monitor and report developments which could help, which could threaten Macedonia's stability. And then later on, we also had what in UN terms is called the Good Offices Mission, where the Security Council asked us to, um, the special representative of the Secretary General to use his good offices as appropriate to help to promote peace and stability within the country, because there were tensions between the ethnic Albanian minority and the ethnic Macedonians. And that mission, I think, was fairly successful, is generally regarded as one of the more successful peacekeeping missions which the UN has deployed. And then I was also sent, my second peacekeeping mission was in Haiti, which is back in the news where we served to try, and there the mission was to help and uh to develop uh uh a Haitian national police force, which was very, very challenging because Haiti had never had a uh civilian police force. Um they'd had the Tonton Makutes, um, extra paramilitary force under the Duvalers, uh, Papa Doc and Baby Doc. And so you had to build uh a civilian police force uh from scratch. It was a civilian police mission. And then after a couple of years in Haiti, um I went back to um uh to the Balkans and this time to Sarajevo, to Bosnia. And it was interesting to be back in the Balkans after the Dayton Agreement, which had ended the war, and there again we were helping um there to help professionalize and develop the police force. And after those three peacekeeping three peacekeeping missions, I then got um the call that um Kofi Annan, who was then getting ready for his second term as UN Secretary General, and I got a call and the appointment to serve as his director of strategic planning, which is a remarkable experience to serve with him. And I did that for five and a half years throughout the last six months of his first term and then the entire second year term, we can talk a little bit more about that, and I also then stayed with Ban Ki moon, his successor, for his um first year, and then I've come full circle um back in academia, but I should also mention that when I left the UN before coming back to our alma mater tufts, I also worked at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

I want to cover that.

SPEAKER_02 10:02

And uh yes, so I was there as the senior vice president uh for the Center of Conflict Management, and I've come full circle, you see, back in academia. So that's sort of a quick um rundown of what I've been doing. It'd be interesting for you to let me know what you have been doing in all this time.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Well, uh we we have an overlap and not an overlap with Manhattan, because after I graduated from Tufts in 1985, I uh worked on Wall Street for a year uh with the Irving Trust Company as a financial auditor. And I lived at a small uh SRO apartment at the corner of East 23rd in Lexington, and then I went to law school at George Washington and kind of did a circuitous route between uh first doing corporate law and litigation for two years and finally uh found my love or started my love as a public defender lawyer in 1991. So I've mainly been doing criminal defense ever since.

SPEAKER_02 11:02

Terrific, terrific. So we both also um spent time not only in Manhattan, but also in Washington.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

That's right, where I never bumped into you. What is it that sparked your interest in international relations and international law?

SPEAKER_02 11:19

Yeah, no, that's a very uh interesting question. Um I think um when I was 15, um I had the opportunity to finish high school in Canada. So I traveled at 15, uh over 6,500 miles away from my home. I was born and grew up in Freetown, so 6,500 miles away to Victoria in British Columbia in Vancouver Island. And it was at the Leicester Pearson United World College on the island, and that had a transformative experience on my life, my outlook, and my ambitions. Because the United that college, which is part of the United World College system, brings together students from all over the world, from different cultures, nationalities. And when I arrived there, um we had 200 students and from 50 different countries. And so um, and for my over my two years at the at the college, finishing high school, I had roommates from Canada, from Malta, from Sweden, from Colombia, from Belgium. And so, in that unique international environment, at such a formative age, you learnt a lot about human beings, and I think most importantly, uh the commonality of human beings, our common nature, the inseparability of our lives, despite the accidents of birth, of race, of nationality, of religion and culture. And so that sparked my interest. And because the college was named after Lester Pearson, who was Canada's prime minister, and before that Canada's foreign minister, um it had a lot of um influence on my own thinking because Lester Pearson had uh played a critical role in the launching of the first large-scale UN peacekeeping um operation um in at Suez during the Suez Crisis for which he won uh the Nobel um the Nobel Prize.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

So I think that had a great 1956 Suez Crisis, or uh well, it must be because it was called the Sinai Crisis for the 1973 matter.

SPEAKER_02 14:10

Yes, it was the 56 at Suez. So I think that had a huge influence and both on my thinking, my interest in international uh affairs. Um I wanted to maybe have the opportunity to see some, if not all, of the places that my classmates had come from, uh and and and shift my view uh about the world. And I think, as I said, the essential commonality of the human experience.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

Got it. So uh what uh drove your interest in the peace aspect of international affairs, although I uh suppose that's a big uh part of international affairs, and uh what has been your experience in the area of negotiations and dealing with crisis, despite what you've been speaking about? And you've been speaking about a lot involving uh crisis.

SPEAKER_02 15:03

Yeah, I I think um uh my father had a lot to do with it because he was a great fan of Ralph Bunch. So ever since I was a kid, uh my father always talked about Ralph Bunch and how important Ralph Bunch had been. And of course, Ralph Bunch was an I later, of course, the older I got, realized that he was an extraordinary diplomatic genius. Um, the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 because he negotiated the armistice agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors after the First Arab-Israeli War. And no one has been able to do that before, did that before or since. And Ralph Bunj also was the father of UN peacekeeping, and he laid down the three key principles of peacekeeping, which we're still being used today, that um you go in with the consent of the of the government and the authorities in a particular country, uh, you have to be impartial, and you use um force only in self-defense or in defense of the mandate. And those core principles that Ralph Bonch laid down in in the 1940s are still the bedrock principles of UN peacekeeping today. So having Ralph Bonch as a hero really uh um was a tremendous influence uh in my wanting to get involved in the United Nations and in peacekeeping in in particular. And I would say that um, of course, in peacekeeping, you have the opportunity to negotiate with with warring parties or former warring uh parties, and we we had to do that. Um we had to do that in in Macedonia. It was not they were not involved in war, but we had to negotiate. Um, for example, at times when um well at the peak we had a thousand uh peacekeeping troops, about 700 or so from Nordic countries, uh 300 American troops. It was the first place in the Balkans where you had American troops which were deployed, but during the dissolution of former Yugoslavia, there was no established international border between, say, Macedonia, North Macedonia, and Serbia, because they'd all belonged to the same country. And so when the peacekeepers would be patrolling on the border, from time to time they will be apprehended by the Serb forces who would say that they're on the Serb territory. So it made it enormously difficult for us to carry out the mandate because the Security Council had said you had to deploy the troops on the Macedonian side of the border, but there was no recognized border between these two newly independent countries. It was one of the open issues in dispute. So we had to negotiate. The force commander of ONPREDEP, which was the UN Preventive Deployment Force, had to negotiate with the Macedonian authorities and the Serbian authorities, and we we agreed that what we would have something which we called the UN patrol line, which we had actually with the help of the peacekeeping troops plotted out, and that this would be the uppermost limit of our area of operation, and that this was not to prejudge any final settlement of the border, but that would help us to do our job. And that made a huge difference, and that if peacekeepers strayed over this UN patrol line, uh it we got them to agree that this would be considered an honest mistake, and rather than holding them, that they would be allowed to continue. So that's just one example of the of the kind of work that we had an opportunity of doing and that peacekeepers do every day in different parts of the world.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

So for negotiations, as we spoke before uh off-camera before we started, I asked about your familiarity of about getting to yes with Fisher and Yuri. Am I correct that that's pretty much a uh a basic text for anybody who's involved with uh negotiations on the international level?

SPEAKER_02 20:14

I think it is, I think it is, and um uh Fisher and uh provides uh key insights into um negotiations. I think one of the important insights that you you get from from getting to yes um is the fact that you have to separate um people uh from the issues and you have to separate um the problem from personalities. Because uh and I have found in practice that very often if you're negotiating, um there's a tendency to focus on on the people involved, the the personalities. But if you do that, it's very difficult to get to agreement if you personalize the issues. So much better to keep a focus on the issues and keep a focus on the problem and depersonalize the issue. I think that's an important um uh insight. I do think um another uh insight um is that you have to focus on uh interests and not the position. Uh the position really is what someone says that that they really want. But the interest is what they really uh is the real reason for what it is they say they want. So if you focus on the interest, you're getting to the underlying reason of The position. And if you focus on the interest, the underlying reason of what people say they want, it helps you when you are negotiating. And I think another thing I would say is that you have to try to get to mutually beneficial outcomes when you're negotiating. So it's not a zero-sum approach. And that means you have to brainstorm and think of different possible solutions. Because if you just focused on one solution, it may work for you, but it may not work for the client, it may not work for the person across the table. So trying to get a mutually beneficial solution, thinking of possible different solutions, I think all of those insights are what you get from getting to yes. And I think just finally, I would say that you have to also understand and be aware of what will happen if the negotiation fails.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

Right.

SPEAKER_02 23:23

That's right. That you have to have that if it fails. And that, of course, strengthens you, it gives you power in the negotiation. And I think the important thing there is that it prevents you from accepting a negotiation, an agreement which may actually be a very bad agreement. So those are all the insights which I think are useful and applicable when you're negotiating.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

And this year can loop well, Abby, to the criminal defense laws and the trial laws generally. I can't tell you how many prosecutors, the majority of prosecutors to whom I mentioned getting TS say they've never heard of it. They've never heard of this concept of negotiating based on goals and interests versus positions. And one example is not long ago, I had a client charged with drunk driving, uh, blew almost uh three times the legal limit. And the prosecutor just started with this knee-jerk reaction of, okay, John, your client's facing a 10-day mandatory minimum in jail. We'll cut that in half to five days mandatory minimum in jail. So I said, Have you ever read or heard of getting to yes? And she said, uh no. I said, you know, if I was permitted to, I would buy it for every prosecutor's office that I deal with. And I and I told her about it. We still had an impasse. So I was ready for trial. That was my BATNA. My best, what is the best alternative? What does Batna say for? Best alternative to a negotiated agreement, right?

SPEAKER_02 24:57

Yes. And you enjoy trials, don't you?

SPEAKER_01 24:59

I love it. So my BATNA was to go to trial. In fact, uh my clients do me a favor. They they do me a selfish favor when they reject the plea deal because then I get to go to trial. So there's some lawyers who are inclined to push a plea deal on their clients so they can save time from the trial. I'm the opposite. So I I talk to my client about this, and then I'm talking to the prosecutor, talking to the cops. There are four cops in the room, and and I'm moving between talking about the case and just talking just generally, you know, hey, you know, uh, you know, how's how's your schedule going? What kind of case are you doing? What trials have you been doing? Just talking to them like humans. Just like there was a recalcitrant uh police officer once, and I found out that we we we had a mutual uh language in common, uh second language. So I started talking to him in that that was his first language in my alternative language, and and that helped cut through things. So I figured, okay, I have nothing to lose. I'm gonna empower the cops because I've gotten nowhere. I'm at an impasse with the prosecutor. I stood up and I said to the uh two of the lead cops, I said, here's all the self-rehabilitation my client's been doing. Here's why he's gonna lose his job if he has even one day in jail because he's expected to work nearly uh every day of the week. What can we do to meet my client's goal of staying out of jail and just taking as much harshness otherwise about it? So the lead cop said, How about three years of driving with that ignition to lock device, that device you blow into to make sure you have no alcohol on your breath to start the car? Usually that's for one year. I said, sold. And then the prosecutor perhaps felt that she wanted to be empowered, so she said, and 20 hours of community of service. I said, fine, it's done. Of course, I had my client's previous agreement to that. That was getting to yes, that was breaking through a room full of people who were accustomed to negotiating on positions versus goals.

SPEAKER_02 26:55

Right. Absolutely makes a difference. And the fact that you and the cop had something in common also helps when you're negotiating. If there, and you mentioned in that case it was a shared language, uh, and if there are other elements that you can have in common with somebody across the table, it makes a difference because you can connect.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

Yes, I mean there's another prosecutor. I'm not gonna identify him because I still have to deal with him from time to time. Uh, but let's just say he's one of uh the least favorite prosecutors for us criminal defense lawyers to deal with. But I found out that there was something in his personal history that is uh unique, not to many more than three, four, or five lawyers, and I'm one of them. And he just he just likes us talking about those things that have nothing to do with the practice of law, nothing to do with our opposing cases, and then I'm able to loop it right back in. Okay, we've talked about our humanities, let's soup it right back into this case. What can we do to overlap our mutual interests?

SPEAKER_02 28:00

Absolutely. Well, you have to tell me what what why you enjoy trial so much. Because as you're saying, some extra lawyers don't enjoy going to trial.

SPEAKER_01 28:11

Well, um I can thank various people I knew as I was growing up for uh putting me in a position of either starting fist fights or not avoiding fist fights. Uh it may not come as a surprise. Part of it was my mouth. Sometimes I would say things that made someone want to throw the first punch. But uh the the fact of the matter is uh I've learned I learned early on, not less with my fists, but okay, we'll call her Mrs. Smith. She had a different name back in those days. Ms. wasn't being used in school. My uh I was in fifth grade, and this fourth grade teacher pulls me aside in the hallway before school starts, and this has really helped show you why I love to fight in court so much. And she accused me, she said, What were you doing playing in the garden apartments last week? And I said, What makes you say I was doing that? I just thought it was hilarious because I'd never been to those garden apartments. I had seen them. She said, Well, there's a point of a brown-haired boy, dark brown hair at the time, in a blue jacket playing over there. So I don't know what got to me without missing a beat. I had such venom against her because the year before she prevented me from performing with the ensemble in the holiday concert, my first year, my which was gonna be my first band concert, playing the trumpet, because I had the audacity to disregard her telling me, don't go down to the auditorium to play with the ensemble, to practice with them until you're called. So I went down there anyway and saw a black room, uh totally darkened. So I said to her, uh, well, you know, you've just described half the boys in the school, Mrs. Smith. And you know, I don't know if the fish story keeps getting uh, you know, bigger and bigger. She was just taken aback. She was speechless. But really, this this power of using words to uh speak up for justice. I mean, I totally believe that I'm on the side of the angels, even when I'm representing people accused of doing horrid things, even if they did do it. Uh, I mean, this is my element. I just come alive. Uh it's it's the it's the argument of it, it's the in in the moment aspect of it. I'm very big on being in the moment, uh, being in the present. Uh Ram Das, you made me know who he was. He was born Richard Alfred, and and he and Timothy Leary were uh sharing LSD with a bunch of people in the early 60s when LSD was still lawful when they were at uh Harvard. And uh Ram Das, who uh uh Richard Alfred became, wrote this book, Be Here Now, Be in the Moment. This whole thing about just fighting in the moment is just exhilarating. But most important is for my clients because I often get great results for them. And when I'm negotiating with the prosecutors, knowing that I will go to trial, I'm crazy enough, some of them think, to just uh uh spend all these all this time in trial that can't be profitable uh for me, so they think, uh, you know, money-wise, it really helps the negotiations too. Yeah, of course. Why why did the uh do you think the Soviet Union fell in large part because uh Reagan was going so nuts with uh building up the U.S. nuclear arsenal? That's what I understand. You know, that the Soviet Union was spending so much money on its military that its economy collapsed.

SPEAKER_02 31:25

Yeah, and it's extraordinary because that all of that was happening, I think, uh um just when I was finishing up my PhD and starting my career, and I think you must have been in in law school at the time, right? Right. Because um uh you had uh pressure internally, you had um um uh republics which wanted to break up, you had uh um, of course, the role of Gorbachev as well. But I think fundamentally, of course, what happens is you see, it was an empire, and history teaches us that empires are ephemeral and resistance is eternal, and empires always collapse, and uh whether it's the British Empire, whether it's the Roman Empire, what have you, they always collapse. So I think that's a a real lesson uh uh about empires.

SPEAKER_01 32:24

I do want to address with you, Carl Fianna, uh definitely, but before we do that, uh how long were you at the uh US Peace Institute? Uh is it really just a shell? Is is is it really existing anymore right now?

SPEAKER_02 32:39

Well, I was at uh the US Institute of Peace in Washington for four years after I left uh the UN. And the mission, it was a really unique institution. It had a very clear mission, which was to help um prevent, uh, to mitigate and to resolve violent conflict. And it did very key, important work. Um, it certainly did a lot of important work on research, um, looking and trying to understand the drivers of conflict, the causes of conflict, political, economic, social, and cultural, and to contribute to an important literature about conflict management, both the initial onset of conflict, preventing spread and escalation, and preventing resolution. So it contributed to that body of literature. It also USIP played a key role in terms of uh education and training, because it trained mediators and negotiators and civil society leaders in the techniques of conflict prevention, how you conduct mediations, the sort of things we've been talking about, how you negotiate, how you get to win-win win-win outcomes. And USIP also worked on the ground in terms of in both conflict and in post-conflict um settings, in trying to promote dialogue among conflicting parties, in trying to forge solutions. And because it wasn't a government, it also had a certain credibility and could do things that governments uh uh could not do. So I think all of those were very useful uh contributions which the institute performed. And I think the the legacy of its work is there in terms of um contributions to the field. The books which were published are are used widely in universities, in colleges, the training manuals as well, and then all the the alums who participated in its activities. So it was a great um uh and valuable contribution which it made to the field of conflict management.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

Okay, has the institute been gutted? And if so, is it possible that it can be uh revived after Trump is out of the White House?

SPEAKER_02 35:45

Well, you know, it's always hard to tell, but um uh I hope that um regardless of what happens in the future, that the legacy of the Institute will continue, that the contribution that it made to our thinking and our understanding of conflicts and how you avert conflicts, um, that will continue to inspire future generations of mediators. I think those who were fortunate enough to benefit from the work of the Institute and the training of the Institute will continue in various ways, whether they're part of governments or civil society organizations or uh in academia. And then those who are actually uh trained in the ground and the and the and the the work in the field, all of that will be part of the legacy uh of the institute.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

Okay, I've heard you speak about uh Kofi Anon in in very uh complimentary terms. And uh let's start out with um often with my guests, I uh offer them an opportunity to self-promote early on. You've written five books, I understand. Uh what are the titles of those books and what are they about?

SPEAKER_02 37:06

Well, the very first book which I did was many voices, multilateral negotiations in the global arena. So we've been talking about negotiations. And the very first book uh I published, I was at Georgetown uh at the time, looking at specifically uh well negotiations in general and multilateral negotiations in particular, some of the challenges involved when you have a great number of actors and the different issues, which is very different if you're doing bilateral negotiations. And of course, multilateral negotiations, that's the the bread and butter of um of international organizations like the UN. And then after this very important experience I had with Onpredep, the UN Preventive Deployment Force in North Macedonia, I thought it was important to write about it. Because as it turns out, the UN hadn't done uh launched a preventive mission before, and it hasn't done one since. And so I thought it would be important to try and understand what we tried to do in OnPredep and why the mission was successful, some of the challenges we we've faced, and to draw some lessons from that experience, and to have a book which would be accessible both to academics and scholars and students and anyone who was interested in prevention really. And then the third one was actually linked to my work with Kofi Annan, which we'll talk about the book later on, because when Kofi appointed me his director of strategic planning, of course, much of the work involved trying to work on his uh priorities and his annual priorities as well as his priorities for his five-year term. But there was one aspect of my job which I really enjoyed, which was working on uh the Kofi Annan lecture series. You see, this came about after 9-11 uh and the Iraq War. 9-11 happened uh towards the end of Kofi's first term, and then of course we had the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which cast a shadow uh over the organization. And Kofi thought, well, what can we do to bring the staff together, to bring the member states together, to bring civil society. So part of my job was to work on organizing this lecture series and to come up with possible titles for the lectures and then reach out to really um lecturers and distinguished Nobel laureates and practitioners like Desmond Tutu, Amatias Sen, Tony Morrison gave the first inaugural lecture on the humanities in 9-11. And after I'd left the UN, I contacted Kofi and I said, you know, um many people will not remember that this was a really extraordinary initiative in bringing together all these really fantastic speakers. And why don't I go and edit these lecture series, um, the lectures and put them together? And he he was thrilled. He said, that's a very good idea. And I was actually at USIP at the time, and he wrote the forward to the book, and the title I chose for it was The Brilliant Art of Peace, lectures from the Kofi Annan series, and the brilliant art of peace was a phrase by Tony Morrison, which he had used in the inaugural lecture. So that was the next book, and then the fourth one was a book which looked at the relationship between the UN Secretary General and the Security Council. It always struck me.

SPEAKER_01 41:52

Oh, don't let us have uh this is frozen on my end or your end. Okay, we're back. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 42:01

Yeah, which um it struck me when I was at both as a as an academic and at the UN that you had many books on the United Nations Security Council and many books also on individual secreties general, but there was no book which had looked at the intersection between the Secretary General and the Security Council. And so this book looked at each Secretary General right up to the eighth Ban Ki moon and the intersection uh between uh the Secretary General and the Security Council, called the this a dynamic relationship. And then the fifth book, as you say, um is the the latest one called Kofi Annan and Global Leadership at the United Nations, which was published last year um by Oxford University Press. And what I tried to do in that book was to explore how Kofi Annan exercised global leadership um at a turbulent period in world affairs from 1997 to 2006 and uh how he's he used his position as uh Secretary General to make a difference. It is such a unique position, that of Secretary General, because uh a Secretary General uh is not a head of state or head of government. A secretary general has no hard power. Um the secretary general has no territory, uh, commands no armies, and cannot impose taxes, um, and yet is expected to come up uh with solutions to some of the most difficult problems uh in the world. But what this Secretary General has a softbar, which Kofi was able to use quite effectively to promote important issues like the Millennium Development Goals, which was the first time that the world community had come around a set of goals, and the Millennium Development Goals paved the way for the 17 sustainable development goals which we have today. And he also understood that the United Nations is an organization of states, but he always stressed that the charter of the UN was adopted in the name of we the peoples.

SPEAKER_01 44:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 44:49

You see, not we the states. And so he worked to bring the needs of peoples and the rights of people at the center of the UN's action. And I think another important legacy about Annan was that he tried to improve the way that the UN works. So and he understood that in improving the way the UN works, it could not just in the 21st century and in an era of globalization re just depend on the power of states. It had to reach out to other actors, non-state actors, to the business community, to civil society, to non-governmental organizations, and he reached out and formed these partnerships so that they could provide the expertise that the UN lacked to provide the resources, particularly for the UN's development work, and that these organizations could actually be advocates for the UN's work. So it was a very forward-looking view of the organization. And you know, today, um uh as we're discussing, this is HIV AIDS Day, uh, today, and it reminded me that Kofi led the way. He he was critical in the establishment of the global fund uh to tackle HIV AIDS, and and he used his convening power to bring uh the CEOs of the pharmaceutical companies to make sure that they would provide anti-retroviral drugs at reasonable prices for people in developing countries. You know, when he was Secretary General, you you had in Africa alone 5,000 people who were dying from AIDS every day. And there are millions of people who are alive today because Kofi Annan demonstrated a leadership of empathy, uh of compassion, and a robust kind um of leadership.

SPEAKER_01 47:23

Okay, so I remember hearing you talk about that uh on a podcast. So uh clearly these uh pharmaceutical companies they have an obligation, their shareholders, no matter how much a CEO might have a soft heart or not. So, what did Kofi Anand do to uh encourage these pharmaceutical companies? Was it that, hey, you know, you're gonna get some uh uh goodwill about this? Was it deeper than that, I suppose?

SPEAKER_02 47:50

Um I think in the well, Annan, um, as I said, the Secretary General has no hard power, but what the Secretary General has is the power of persuasion. And Kofi Annan had a tremendous power of persuasion. Um he also had charisma and he was able to build a trust, you see. Trust is the oil that lubricates relationships, uh, it is intensely personal, it takes time to develop, uh, and he was able to build trust with these leaders, so much so that um I think uh shame in this case proved more powerful than profit.

SPEAKER_01 48:41

Excellent.

SPEAKER_02 48:42

Uh and that is why he was able to get them around the table. It was a very um um uh controversial thing to do because there were member states and even people within the UN system who did not think that Kofi Annan should be reaching out to the private sector or reaching out to govern um uh to CEOs. But he felt this was a very backward-looking way that you had to reach out uh to CEOs and bring them in and make them partners in what the UN was trying to do.

SPEAKER_01 49:20

A good thing that he did. Okay, she also worked with Ban Ky Moon. My wife grew up in Korea, so that alone makes me want to know about any insights you might be able to share about him that might not be otherwise known.

SPEAKER_02 49:33

Yes, well, I I stayed with Ban Ky-moon during his first year as Secretary General and during the transitions. And of course, it's always difficult when you are a successor and you're coming after a very successful Secretary General like Kofi Annan. So, and he had huge shoes to feel it would have been difficult for for anybody, particularly in the early stages. But I think what, and a good leader uh leaves a legacy uh for uh his or her successor, which Annan did. And one of the areas where Ban Ki-moon, I think, picked up effectively on what Kofi Annan had done was in the area of climate change. You see, Kofi very early on in his term at Secretary General, in fact, in the very first year as Secretary General, um, we had we've just had COP 30 in Belén in Brazil. When we had COP 3, Kofi had a very strong message to COP 3, and he made the point to COP 3 in Kyoto, in Japan's historic traditional capital, that climate change posed the greatest existential threat to humanity as we know it. And he said to COP 3 that it was better to adopt the principle that precaution now is better than panic later. And Kyoto, the Kyoto Agreement was the first binding agreement that we had on climate change. And Ban Ki moon was able to build on that legacy which Kofi Annan had left and to really push for the agreement which we had at Paris in 2015. And building on that legacy of Kofi Anan, I think was a very, I think perhaps the most important example uh of the work that uh Ban Kimun did as uh Secretary General and as Anand's successor.

SPEAKER_01 51:53

Thank you for that. Now I want to go back to that talk we had when we met in the cafeteria for lunch, and you said information overload. Was that just uh some basic idea you had, or does it come from something deeper? What do you do to work on yourself to make yourself such an extraordinary person? When I posted uh that uh story on uh uh LinkedIn a few months ago about you, uh one of the comments that came back was that you are an have been a North Star for people in this area. People in this area of uh international law, diplomacy, foreign relations, I don't think that they uh they heap on praise uh uh you know, unless they really mean it.

SPEAKER_02 52:37

Well, that was that is very kind, and people uh can be very, very kind. Um I think one of the things um it's it's of course it's sometimes very difficult. I think when I made that statement, I hadn't fully understood how difficult it is when you have information overload. But I think over time what you try to do and what I've tried to do is to plan and to plan well and try not to leave things till the very last moment. If you can, it's not always possible. Um I think second, you have to work with a team and you build a good team around you, because no one accomplishes anything on their own. And in every kind position I've had, I try to build a good team so that you can delegate. I don't think um that people give off their best if you're breathing down their neck. I take a different view to management, and I think if you delegate, uh then it helps you. You have less information to deal with, uh, and it also empowers people on your team who can who can work with you. And I think in the long run, it's important to have uh humility in in what we do. Um uh and it means um uh being able to listen, to consult, to take good advice and and to learn from others. And I think all of those um I think having uh humility also helps, uh, and in the sense that you can't always do everything that you wish you can do and and meet every conceivable deadline, and and it makes a big difference.

SPEAKER_01 54:55

Well said. So the name of the show is Beat the Prosecution. I'm not gonna suggest that you have a preference for any particular side and criminal justice, but aside from the great uh pearls you've already said, do you have anything to say to criminal defendants, criminal defense lawyers, trial lawyers in general, even prosecutors that you haven't said already that you think is important for them to think about or to know?

SPEAKER_02 55:22

Well, um, as you say, not not being uh a lawyer myself, even though I've been fascinated by the law for a long time, I think it is try is to try, however difficult it is to make sure that clients have a fair trial and to pursue, even though it can be difficult, uh justice in the sense that because from my own experience, um in order you have to have order and justice in the world. And those you can't have a peaceful and an a world of order without justice. There are two sides of the same coin. And the degree to which um criminal attorneys help those to have a fair trial and to support a judicial system which can provide justice is a really important contribution not only to individuals, it is an important contribution to the countries in and the societies in which they work, and it can have a ripple effect uh globally. Uh, the importance of the rule of law. And the importance of the rule of law is the foundation for democratic societies, it is the foundation uh of stability. And the absence of the rule of law, I have found, uh, can be one of the main reasons why you have conflict uh in the world.

SPEAKER_01 57:03

Well said. Now, I'm supposed to know how to pronounce your first name. Abby Odun.

SPEAKER_02 57:09

You've always called me Abby.

SPEAKER_01 57:11

So that's just to make sure they find your books. So you see the way his name, all your books are uh uh entitled with the author's name of your full name, right? A-B-I-O-D-O-D-U-U-N, right? Abby Odin. You have you've all heard from Abby Williams. I'm so delighted to be back with you, Abby. Thank you so much. This is John Katza, Beat the Prosecution, because there is no other way. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer in Fairfax, Northern Virginia.

SPEAKER_00 57:40

Thank you for listening to this week's episode from Beat the Prosecution. This is a regular podcast giving people a leg up against police investigations and prosecutions. Nothing discussed on our media sources, such as our podcast or website, is legal advice. John Katz only provides legal advice to current clients or to individuals who have paid for a consultation. We welcome you contacting us via email at info at beatheprosecution.com by calling our office at 703 383 1100 or texting us at 571 406 7268.