"Not being bold is sometimes too awful to imagine,” says Katie Redford. She should know. Katie’s career as a human rights lawyer is a combination of the boldest elements. It started in a small village near the border of Thailand and Burma, where she volunteered as an English teacher directly after college. It was an experience that changed this champion athlete from Massachusetts forever.
Very soon after arriving, Katie became painfully aware of the challenges faced by the people she was teaching. The brutal military dictatorship in Burma had created a constant stream of refugees into the already-impoverished border region as the army and the rebel forces battled it out. Anxious to be of more use, Katie headed for a refugee camp to teach English and live with a displaced Burmese family that had escaped to Thailand. She found herself teaching in a bamboo hut, while bombs exploded around her.
As the violence escalated, the Burmese refugees began to look to her and other foreign relief workers for more help. Each story—of murder, rape, forced labor, and torture—was more terrible than the last one. As she listened, Katie’s moment of obligation crystallized—she had discovered what she wanted to do, and was not afraid that it would involve living thousands of miles away from home.
In the fall of 1992, Katie enrolled at the University of Virginia Law School to study human rights and environmental law. However, she returned to Thailand and Burma often—once on a fellowship to study the World Bank’s work in the region and another time as a Human Rights Watch intern. On one such trip, she met the Burmese activist Ka Hsaw Wa, a fierce advocate for restoring human rights to his fellow citizens. They bonded over their passion for justice but soon their connection evolved into a powerful personal relationship that has since resulted in marriage and two children.
Together, Katie and Ka Hsaw sneaked into the jungles of Burma to record military abuses and human rights violations associated with the construction of the billion-dollar oil pipeline, Yadana, a collaboration of the French company Total and the California-based Unocal.
As they spent weeks on a boat going up and down the Salween River to meet and interview refugees, Katie sensed that for most refugees, their personal suffering and the devastation of their lands were intertwined. Excessive logging had destroyed the jungles and wreaked havoc on local ecosystems. Projects like the Yadana Pipeline were displacing villagers from the lands of their ancestors. To the refugees, these environmental abuses were on par with the human rights abuses they had experienced. For Katie, this was a stark realization—there was a real connection between human rights and environmental rights. For Katie, this was a stark realization—there was a real connection between human rights and environmental rights.
Back at law school, Katie began to envision ways to bring the tools and resources of two different fields—human rights and environmental rights—together, in new and powerful ways. She found a kindred spirit in her classmate, Tyler Giannini, and the two of them began to explore what this new and untested territory might look like. Soon the focal point of their work became Unocal’s role in the human rights abuses suffered by Burmese villagers affected by the Yadana Pipeline.
The gall to think big kicked in. Was there a way to hold this U.S. corporation accountable? Finally, after much independent research, Katie and Tyler found a little-used law dating from 1789 called the Alien Torts Claims Act. This law allowed citizens of other countries to sue in U.S. courts for human rights violations occurring overseas.
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