Legal Capacity Development
In many countries around the world, lawyers with the courage and skills needed to defend human rights and pursue cases in the public interest are scarce. Expanding human rights protections and the rule of law hinges on developing local capacity to spearhead change in legal practice and advocacy. One of the principal ways to achieve this is to create opportunities for local actors to learn by doing. Through the Justice Initiative’s Legal Capacity Development (LCD) Program, aspiring human rights advocates receive professional training in litigation, advocacy, technical assistance, research and writing. In the long term, creating and sustaining growth in human rights requires a critical mass of skilled and committed advocates.
The LCD program promotes skills and opportunities for human rights advocacy among young lawyers and seeks to develop a culture of public service in the legal profession. The Justice Initiative works to develop legal capacity in two principal ways: through clinic-based training programs and human rights fellowships.
Clinical Legal Education
The Justice Initiative’s clinical legal education (CLE) project operates through university-based legal clinics: faculty and student-run legal aid offices that provide pro-bono legal services to the most vulnerable members of society. These clinics offer front-line justice services to the poor and disenfranchised, in areas ranging from criminal defense to community legal empowerment to legal assistance for people with HIV/AIDS.
University-based legal clinics require only modest financial and human resources. But in addition to providing legal services to those who otherwise would not receive them, these clinics help introduce new subjects and innovative law teaching methods to existing law school curricula. Moreover, they provide opportunities for law students to gain practical skills while developing a human rights and public service ethos.
Starting in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where the program helped establish nearly 75 legal clinics, the Justice Initiative has created new clinics around the world. From Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone to Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey to Panassastra University in Cambodia, clinics founded or supported by the Justice Initiative now help train scores of lawyers a year.
In addition, the Justice Initiative seeds new clinics by conducting trainings in promising locales. Recent trainings have been held for teachers and administrators from Afghanistan, Indonesia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Tajikistan. After one such training, the International Legal Foundation created a criminal defense clinic at Herat University in Afghanistan, following groundwork laid by the Justice Initiative. Preparations are underway to establish community empowerment clinics at Pasundan University and International Islamic University in Indonesia, and a public interest law clinic at the University of the Holy Spirit in Kaslik, Lebanon.
Human Rights Fellowship Program
Through its Human Rights Fellowship Program, the Justice Initiative works directly with lawyers and law students, preparing them to pursue human rights advocacy and fortifying the growing network of advocates essential to an open society. The fellows spend one year attending human rights courses and interning with an NGO, then spend a second year working full-time for an NGO in their home countries. The program provides fellows—all of whom come from non-Western countries—with important first-hand experience, while building the capacity of human rights organizations.
One of the Justice Initiative’s fellows went on to found Timap for Justice, a non-profit in Sierra Leone that trains paralegals to help fill gaps in the justice system—gaps that are alarmingly common in one of the poorest countries in the world.
The fellowship program has a special focus on Central Asia, where it seeks to build the capacity of lawyers to advocate for human rights and promote change through legal means. Currently the main focus is on seeking legal remedies for torture in Central Asia.
In the past five years, the Justice Initiative has helped train 81 fellows from Africa, Central and Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Below are brief profiles of selected fellows:
Solomon Abebe (Ethiopia) is a lawyer for the NGO Action: Professionals’ Association for the People. He organizes and conducts human rights trainings for judges and prosecutors, carries out research and develops human rights training materials.
Renata Arianingtyas (Indonesia) is director of the Bridging Diversity Program at the Tifa Foundation in Jakarta, where she counducts trainings in human rights education, conflict resolution, consensus building and inter-religious tolerance.
Elvira Habibulina (Kyrgyzstan) is director of the Center for Legal Assistance for Prisoners, an NGO devoted to protection of prisoners’ rights, assistance in penal reform and reduction of incarceration. She monitors prisoners' rights; provides legal aid to prisoners, former prisoners and their relatives; and advocates for the liberalization of criminal legislation, with special emphasis on the application of alternatives to incarceration.
Akaki Minashvili (Georgia) is a lawyer at the Liberty Institute, a Georgian human rights NGO. He provides free legal counseling to victims of human rights violations, focusing on freedom of expression and freedom of information issues. He is currently participating in the drafting of a law on freedom of the press, speech, and broadcasting, and was actively involved in drafting the new Criminal Procedural Code of Georgia.
Marta Villarreal (Mexico) coordinates the Clinical Legal Education Program and Public Interest Law Clinic projects conducted by the Department of Law at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) where she has also worked with the Access to Justice Program.
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Contact
Zaza Namoradze: info@justiceinitiative.org
Tel: + 361 327-3100
Fax: + 361 327-3101