Alumna Margaret Maffai ‘09, who served as Research Project Coordinator for the Wisconsin International Law Society draft of a model law that was presented to the United Nations Working Group on the use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights, was an invited participant in a workshop at the International Peace Initiative offices in New York City in July 2009 to discuss a convention drafted by the Working Group as a counterpart to the model law.
                    
The Working Group’s draft convention on private military and security companies (PMSCs) is tentatively set to be presented to the UN in summer 2010.

The workshop brought together members of the Working Group, several members of the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, and representatives of  “civil society,” including representatives of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the ICRC and the International Peace Operations Association (the American lobby group for the PMSC industry).

The primary focus of the workshop, Maffai says, was “what, if any, types of activities are inappropriate for government outsourcing to private companies.”

The model law that was worked out by Wisconsin law students, referred to as the Wisconsin document, was presented by the Working Group in fall 2008 at their international conference in Moscow, and subsequently published in Russian by the Russian journal International Criminal Law and International Justice (No. 2, 2009) and the Wisconsin International Law Journal (2009).

Maffai, now affiliated with the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, wrote a guest column for the legal news Web site Jurist about the project.

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