JEWISH WORLD

ROBERT AMSTERDAM: ‘First

and foremost I’m a lawyer’

COURTESY ROBERT AMSTERDAM

Tilting at Governments
International lawyer Robert Amsterdam doesn’t shy away tained campaigns of delegitimization aimed at
antagonistic regimes domestically and abroad,
from using verbal heavy artillery in his battles on behalf Amsterdam employs clever blitzkriegs of sub-
of prominent clients versive media content to challenge ruling gov-
ernments’ versions of events. He issues in-
The Jerusalem Report, seething with indigna- depth white papers, dashes off Op-Ed pieces in
Tibor Krausz Bangkok tion at the charge leveled at him by detractors newspapers like The Wall Street Journal, and
that he’s an unscrupulous media-savvy apolo- blogs indefatigably.

H
E’S BEEN CALLED “A
dirty Yid,” a “shyster” and –
this needles him most – “a PR
hack.” For Robert Amsterdam,
derogatory epithets dished out
at him in state-controlled media from Russia to
Venezuela to Thailand come with the territory.
Embroiled in high-profile legal tussles on
behalf of prominent clients like jailed Russian
oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Thaksin
Shinawatra, the ousted prime minister of
Thailand, Amsterdam wages unrelenting wars
of words through the media with the govern-
ments of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Venezuela’s
Hugo Chavez and incumbent Thai premier
Abhisit Vejjajiva.
“Sure I go to the press,” Amsterdam tells
gist for clients with questionable reputations.
“What are you supposed to do in countries
with no rule of law, knowing you’re getting
railroaded?” he elucidates. “Are you supposed
to stay quiet when your client gets thrown in
jail on trumped-up charges in show trials? No,
sir! Call me a PR hack, but if you’re gonna
screw with my client, I’m gonna go out there
and scream from the mountaintops.”
And so he does.
Denied entry to Russia and Thailand and
reportedly on the hit list of paramilitaries in
Venezuela, Amsterdam is barred from arguing
his cases in local courts (which are hopelessly
prejudiced against his clients anyway, he
believes); but he continues to advocate for
them in the court of public opinion. In sus-
His award-winning blog on Russian poli-
tics, available in five languages, reaps up to
50,000 daily visits, making the Canadian
lawyer’s eponymous website one of the most
read Internet publications on the country’s
affairs. Amsterdam’s new 80-page white paper
on Thailand, meanwhile, lets fly at the current
military-backed government by highlighting
its alleged illegitimacy and systematic human
rights abuses after four turbulent years, which
began in September 2006, with an army coup
against Amsterdam’s client, democratically
elected prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra,
and culminated last May in the murder of more
than 90 of Thaksin’s supporters on the streets
of Bangkok.
Despite Thai authorities’ sweeping suppres-

26 THE JERUSALEM REPORT OCTOBER 11, 2010

sion of opposition views, Amsterdam has no
trouble getting his message into Thailand far
and wide. He’s the kind of fellow, after all, who
got around blanket censorship in Guatemala by
airdropping his own magazines into the coun-
try to advocate his position on behalf of his
clients, two men engaged in a protracted legal
battle with some of Central America’s most
powerful corporate kingpins.
A
FOUNDING PARTNER OF THE
international law firm Amsterdam &
Peroff with offices in Toronto,
Washington and London, the Jewish lawyer
has recently been retained by Thailand’s fugi-
tive prime minister, who is wanted at home on
corruption and “terrorism” charges.
Amsterdam now represents Thaksin’s belea-
guered supporters, a movement of mostly rural
and urban poor calling themselves the “Red
Shirts” after their trademark attire.
Hundreds of members of the United Front
for Democracy against Dictatorship, as the
grouping is officially known, have been lan-
guishing under arrest since May, after bands of
protesters torched several high-value buildings
in retaliation for the military’s iron-fisted dis-
persal of their encampment in central Bangkok
following a raucous two-month standoff that
had paralyzed parts of the Thai capital.
Last May, Amsterdam flew to Bangkok to
advise Red Shirt leaders during failed negotia-
tions with the government before the impend-
ing military crackdown. “You just have to have
been in Bangkok to feel threatened by the
[army’s] brutality and militarization,” the
lawyer recalls. A friend of his, a foreign jour-
nalist, was shot and injured, Amsterdam says.
“To be walking around Bangkok representing
Thaksin in those circumstances was a bit out
there,” he adds, “but I was caught up by the
grotesque persecution of these people – elderly
men and women, couples with children.”
Amsterdam is no longer welcome to the
self-styled Land of Smiles, but he remains in
full adversarial mode by remote control. “[The
authorities] have barred me personally, but they
haven’t prevented us from presenting our point
of view,” he says. “The Internet gives us a
voice. We write an op-ed [on his blog] on
Monday and by Tuesday it’s being [dissemi-
nated] across Thailand.” His pro-Red Shirt
point of view has earned him prominent ill-
wishers among Bangkok’s royalist elite, who
views Thaksin as an enemy of the state. In a
recent article “Don’t Shoot the Shyster!” pub-
lished by the country’s English-language
Nation newspaper, a Thai-American novelist
decries Amsterdam as a brazen fantasist in a
screed replete with anti-Jewish innuendo.
“Amsterdam is more of a lobbyist than a
lawyer,” a pro-Kremlin newspaper in Serbia
concurs, dismissing the Canadian litigator as a
grandstanding self-promoter less interested in
the quotidian drudgery of legal paperwork than
providing sound bytes in a Manichean render-
ing of complex issues. “Old friends of
Amsterdam remember him as a fonfer, a
Yiddish term for one who talks through his
nose,” the newspaper Borba wrote.
“The anti-Semitism in Russia I expected. I
never said a word about it,” Amsterdam
observes stoically. “But the anti-Semitism in
Thailand I didn’t. Within a certain segment of
the Thai elite, it’s very strong, very pro-
nounced.” He adds: “But I’ve developed thick
skin and I really couldn’t care less.”
I
N THE ANIMATED THRONG OF
protesters chanting slogans and rattling
their trademark foot-shape clappers, there
she stood – a little girl in her little red shirt.
Solemn and subdued, she was clutching a large
laminated picture of a dead man in a morgue
with a bullet hole in his forehead.
The girl’s dad, a Red Shirt protester, had
been shot dead, most likely by army snipers,
during the Thai military’s bloody crackdown
on raucous anti-government demonstrators last
May. Now on September 19, the date marking
the fourth anniversary of a military coup that
ousted Thaksin Shinawatra, the girl and her
mother were here to seek justice. Defying a
strict state of emergency decree still in place
four months on, thousands of Red Shirts gath-
ered in Bangkok’s posh commercial heart to
mourn their movement’s martyrs. They lit
votive candles at impromptu sidewalk shrines,
released red balloons with question marks
(“Where’s Justice?”) into an afternoon sky of
brooding monsoon clouds, and grabbed onto a
giant spider web of sai sin sacred thread, dyed
red, passed around in defiant camaraderie.
Just days before, the Thai Royal Police’s
Department of Special Investigations
announced that its inquest into the deaths of the
90-some protesters gunned down last May had
stalled for lack of evidence – even though
videos of Thai soldiers shooting unarmed civil-
ians, including foreign journalists, are widely
available on YouTube.
“It’s a whitewash and a cover-up,”
Amsterdam fumes. “This case cries out for jus-
tice and we will bring it to foreign courts.”
On the day of the protest in Bangkok he was
in London meeting with prominent opponents
THE JERUSALEM REPORT OCTOBER 11, 2010
of the incumbent Thai regime. He was plotting
legal strategies and working to set up an inde-
pendent investigation into the May bloodshed.
The lawyer was also drafting a notice to inter-
national arms manufacturers to warn them that
their weapon sales to Thailand will make them
complicit in “the murder of civilians in cold
blood.” “The Thai military has been best
deployed by the elite against [Thailand’s] own
citizens,” Amsterdam insists. “This is an army
that every 10 or 15 years goes into the streets
and murders citizens.”
Seemingly indefatigable and driven to the
point of obsession, Amsterdam is an adroit
multitasker. The several interviews he gave to
The Jerusalem Report were interspersed with
beeps, tinkles and chimes from a variety of
electronic devices vying for his attention as
local contacts kept him up to speed with the lat-
est on his firm’s various cases in Thailand, the
Czech Republic, Nigeria and elsewhere. Now
and then, Amsterdam’s long-suffering wife,
Elaine, tried to squeeze a quiet word in apropos
a pending dinner arrangement. The lawyer
happened to be on summer holiday with his
family. “Don’t ask a junkie how he gets his
fix,” Amsterdam, who is voluble and articulate,
notes with a laugh.
An autodidact and bookworm with tottering
piles of academic volumes by his bedside –
currently including titles like “Ordering Power:
Contentious Politics and Authoritarian
Leviathans in Southeast Asia” and “Truth on
Trial in Thailand” – Amsterdam is equally at
home discussing the enduring legacies of mis-
guided US foreign policy during the Cold War
and the stifling social burdens of Thailand’s
feudal hierarchy. “One of the things I’ve found
in places like Russia and Thailand,” he
observes, “is that a lack of legitimacy [by an
autocratic government] goes hand in hand with
a tremendous deficit in competence.”
T
HE NEW YORK-BORN JEW, WHO
grew up in Ottawa, Canada, cut his teeth
in the international legal arena in 1997,
when he signed on to represent Juan Arturo and
Juan Guillermo Gutiérrez, a father and son
engaged in a drawn-out legal tug-of-war with
Latin American oligarchs in a “state capture”
case in Guatemala involving allegations of
massive tax fraud and money laundering – and
“the impunity of power,” as Amsterdam puts it.
In what would become one of the biggest
civil cases ever tried in Central America,
Amsterdam filed motions in multiple jurisdic-
tions across the region. Besides dogged litiga-
tion, he also honed his skills of political advo-
27
 JEWISH WORLD

cacy. “We litigated like hell and developed while resisting arrest.
an important human rights campaign as “These are people who are a lot braver
part of our work,” he explains. “How to than I am and I’m proud to be able to
get around extensive state censorship and work with them,” Amsterdam notes.
propaganda provided a template for my Already at age 17, Amsterdam says, he
work later on.” was declared persona non grata in
Amsterdam has since built a career out Czechoslovakia. His crime: discussing
of representing clients in repressive politics with dissidents – or perhaps secu-
regimes and political hotspots the world rity agents masquerading as such.
over. In Russia, he represented billionaire He began his career of challenging
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the coun- authority even before that. In his Toronto
try’s wealthiest oligarchs, sentenced in high school (Amsterdam moved from
2005 to eight years in a Siberian penal New York to Canada at 12 with his moth-
colony for fraud and tax evasion based on er and stepfather), he landed in trouble for
Kremlin-initiated charges generally writing an admiring article about the rad-
regarded as politically motivated. ical Jewish 1960s youth leader Howard
In Venezuela, he’s litigated for Eligio “Abbie” Hoffman for the student newspa-
Cedeno, a prominent banker arrested on per under the title “Seven Ways to [exple-
charges of engaging in illegal dollar trans- tive] the Principal.” Suspended from
actions after becoming involved in opposi- school, he began traveling around Sub-
tion politics against the regime of Hugo Saharan Africa, the Soviet Union, and
Chavez. In Nigeria, Amsterdam has come countries behind the Iron Curtain while
to the defense of Nasir El-Rufai, a promi- accompanying his asthmatic mother seek-

TIBOR KRAUSZ
nent reformist who fell out with the coun- ing treatment at Eastern European spas.
try’s ruling political party and is standing On a beach in Nigeria in 1975,
accused of corruption charges. In Amsterdam says, he chanced upon the
Singapore, he’s signed on to represent Dr. ORPHANED: This girl’s father, a red shirt protester, crucified bodies of the regime’s political
Chee Soon Juan, a much-harassed opposi- had been shot dead in May, most likely by army snipers; opponents.
tion politician. here she demonstrates in Bangkok in September Back then he was a committed
Amsterdam, 54, short and stocky, with Marxist, devouring books on dialectical
babyish pudgy features and thick curly locks, 47s. Prepared for the showdown via a tip-off, materialism. At college in Ottawa, he chose
resembles the stock Hollywood caricature of Amsterdam faced him off with an armed Marxist studies as a major before opting to
the finger-in-every-pie attorney a la Joe Pesci detachment of his own. study law at Queen’s University in Kingston. In
in the movie “My Cousin Vinny.” He rolls with One night in Moscow in 2005, during 1980, Amsterdam set up a legal practice with a
the punches and doesn’t pull his own. After Khodorkovsky’s trial, Amsterdam was woken friend in Toronto, specializing in corporate liti-
Khodorkovsky’s conviction, which he derided by the sound of loud banging on his hotel door. gation in developing countries. Their practice
as “a Kafkaesque show trial,” the Canadian He found himself face to face with six steely- would over the years considerably widen its
lawyer publicly called Russian prosecutors eyed security agents. To avoid a beating or scope, encompassing pro bono legal counsel in
“scum.” In a profile, the journal Canadian worse, the lawyer bluffed. Several journalists human rights cases.
Lawyer called Amsterdam “one of the few were waiting for him in the lobby and US offi- In one such new case Amsterdam is locking
lawyers in the world good at taking on the state cials, too, were coming to meet him, he lied. horns with the United Nations. The institution,
when the state starts acting like a criminal.” A He was left in peace, though not without being he charges, willfully ignored the repeated
senior Thai political analyst agrees, telling The summarily deported. warnings of a UN official in Harare, his client
Report: “[Amsterdam] challenges Thailand’s “As a foreign lawyer I could go on the who is a UN humanitarian coordinator called
culture of impunity, calling the Thai elites out streets of Moscow and call Vladimir Putin a Georges Tadonki, about a deadly cholera out-
on their abuse of the poor and the powerless.” thief. No Russian lawyer could do it and not break in 2008 in Zimbabwe in tacit support for
He certainly doesn’t lack for chutzpa. get murdered,” he tells The Report. “I speak the country’s dictatorial strongman, Robert
Amsterdam travels to hotspots with his own truth to power the best I can and the fact that I Mugabe.
bodyguard and, if need be, changes location am a foreigner means they won’t shoot me.” “[Tadonki] came to us a man broken and
every three hours. While representing Four A writer for Amsterdam’s popular blog on broke just after a heart attack,” says
Seasons in a lawsuit against the owner of the Russian politics, Kremlin critic Magomed Amsterdam, adding he’s working on the case
luxury hotel chain’s property in Caracas, Yevloyev, wasn’t so lucky. In 2008, Yevloyev pro bono. “Some of our best work you won’t
Amsterdam won the case by undoing the was found shot dead at the side of a road in the read about in newspapers,” he insists.
rogue hotelier’s home advantage through suc- volatile Russian republic of Ingushetia, which And that’s why he particularly begrudges
cessfully invoking extraterritorial US legisla- abuts Chechnya, while the journalist was in the the “PR hack” label. “I feel privileged. We
tion. But not before the disgruntled region to report on alleged human rights abus- have a uniquely interesting practice,” he says.
Venezuelan man stormed Amsterdam’s hotel es by Russian authorities. Local police later “But first and foremost I’m a lawyer and I’m
one night with a group of heavies toting AK- claimed Yevloyev had been shot accidentally gonna die a lawyer.” •

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