This week, rights activist Reed Brody brought his seven-year crusade to the African Union summit in Gambia, where he won a partial victory. Senegal agreed to try Habre, but only under a yet-to-be defined mandate from the African Union.

Reed called it a success, though he noted that his fight now just moves back to Senegal, which has to pass a law to allow the trial.

“We want to prove that if the law is on your side, it can happen. You have to create the political climate to make it happen,” the Human Rights Watch lawyer told The Associated Press.

Habre, dubbed “the butcher of Chad,” was ousted by rebels after eight years in power and fled in 1990. Two years later, a commission in Chad accused his regime of 40,000 political killings and systematic torture.

His accusers describe years spent crammed into holding cells without medical care. Some died of asphyxiation because there was not enough air to breathe.

Senegal had asked the African Union to decide whether Habre should be tried in Senegal or be extradited to a Belgian court that has indicted him under a law allowing international pursuit of alleged human rights violators.

Suspects in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda have been tried in Belgium under the law, but the AU decided Habre should be tried in Africa by Senegal.

Much of the reason why Habre was even discussed at the summit can be traced to Brody. He has doggedly worked to get Habre indicted in Senegal, persuaded Belgium to take up the cause and maintained victims’ groups.

“These things don’t happen unless someone digs in and pushes and pushes,” says Brody, 52. “You just need somebody who won’t give up.”

Brody, a heavyset, bookish-looking man who loves chess, arrives at summits and court hearings with an entourage of Chadian activists and victims of Habre’s regime to talk to anyone who will listen.

The New York native got into international justice in 1984 when he took a vacation to visit a friend in Nicaragua and met victims of abuse by Contra rebels. He says he was so moved that he quit his job at the New York Attorney General’s office and spent the next five months crisscrossing Nicaragua to interview victims of the Contras.

Brody says he had a bit of the revolutionary crusader in him. His father was Hungarian Jew who spent three years in German labor camps and his mother was a teacher at an inner-city school in Brooklyn. And he spent a few years as a long-haired hippie.

“My initial intention was to be a civil rights lawyer … so I am, just an international one,” he says.

After returning from Nicaragua, Brody took a job at a large law firm, but only lasted six months before he decided to ditch the corporate life go to work on human rights full time.

In 1998, he joined up with Human Rights Watch.

Which ousted tyrant might he tackle next if he manages to get Habre to court? Haiti’s Jean-Claude Duvalier who lives in France or Ethiopia’s Mengistu Haile Mariam now in exile in Zimbabwe?

Brody says a trial for Habre could serve as a test case for all of them.