Betsy Apple

Legal Director and General Counsel

Betsy has diverse experience as an international human rights lawyer, focusing on issues at the intersection of human rights, gender justice, environmental abuses, and public health.  Before joining AIDS-Free World, she was the director of the Crimes Against Humanity program at Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights). She also served as deputy director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), based in New York.  Prior to that, she was the managing and legal director of EarthRights International, in Thailand and the US, where she focused on corporate accountability for human rights and environmental violations.
 
Betsy has served as legal consultant to various institutions including Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Clinic, Refugees International, and the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma. She is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where she teaches International Human Rights Law. She regularly teaches human rights courses to anthropologists at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She also served as a teaching fellow at Seattle University School of Law for two years.
 
Early in her career, Betsy worked with the Volunteer Legal Services Program in San Francisco, focusing primarily upon family law and civil rights.  She also practiced employment and commercial litigation at the San Francisco law firm of Bronson, Bronson & McKinnon. Betsy graduated from Brown University and Boston College Law School.

Contact Betsy: ba@aidsfreeworld.org  

An Interview with Betsy Apple

Q: Why AIDS and the law?
A: The AIDS pandemic is essentially a human rights crisis, as well as a public health crisis. It’s been fueled by the massive, enduring human rights violations against vulnerable groups—women, sexual minorities, sex workers, amongst others—who have been systematically oppressed and abused. That’s why we are where we are today, with a raging pandemic.

If the most vulnerable people had had their rights protected, AIDS would not have taken such purchase. You have to look at the underlying oppression. And that’s what human rights law is for: to correct the kinds of injustices and violations that provide such a convenient foundation for the spread of HIV/AIDS. I believe one of the strongest and most effective ways to deal with it is by using legal means. At least in theory, the law and legal institutions offer concrete remedies.

At AIDS-Free World, we’re actually working at the cusp of a number of different legal issues. We’re looking at how we use international justice mechanisms to address the abuses that exacerbate the pandemic. This is intriguing, compelling and unusual, not something many organizations are doing. We’re looking at some of the abuses that undergird the epidemic as systematic international crimes, which means we can use the tools of international justice to try to puncture the impunity that surrounds them

Q: You have a background in human rights law focused on other issues. How do you think that helps?
A: I think the connections between human rights and AIDS are inextricable, and by now, very well established. It’s interesting for me to bring my experiences from a human rights and environmental perspective to our work. For me, AIDS is a window to a very broad range of abuses. The window is different but the view, unfortunately, is the same.

We don’t work only on government accountability. We also think about individuals, institutions, corporations… the different kinds of actors whose actions have contributed to injustice. I have worked on issues of corporate accountability for abuses in the past, and I’m particularly interested in that potential aspect of our work.

Q: What part of your work do you find most compelling?
A: Sexual violence is the most compelling for me, as it is so directly connected with epidemic discrimination. Human rights law is all about marginalization, oppression and how to stop it and reverse it. Sexual violence, particularly on a large scale with government engagement or complicity, is a manifestation of this epidemic discrimination. We’re trying to address that. It’s also the part of our work with which I’m most familiar.
Our work on discrimination against sexual minorities is newer to me, and I find what I’m learning so shocking that I can’t help but be compelled by it. I have worked so much with both domestic and international crimes of sexual violence that, for better or for worse, I no longer have to imagine what they look like or how they destroy lives. When I hear the stories of violations against LGBTI communities, it’s newer to me, and it’s so horrifying, it makes my heart stop.

For me, two very different parts of my job are the most interesting. One is when I’m in a place where I’m talking with people who have experienced the kinds of abuses we’re trying to address, hearing their stories and often hearing about their resourcefulness in dealing with those experiences.  The other piece is the more intellectual exercise of researching, thinking about how the law has been used, and how it might be used, to improve human lives.