UWI starts International Human Rights Clinic

Dean of the Faculty of Law Rose-Marie Belle Antoine.
Dean of the Faculty of Law Rose-Marie Belle Antoine.

LISA ALLEN-AGOSTINI

THE Faculty of Law at The University of The West Indies (UWI), St Augustine, has begun an International Human Rights Clinic treating with child rights; gender-based discrimination and violence; rights of refugees, migrants and people deprived of liberty; rights of people living with disabilities; and indigenous communities.

Strengthening TT’s Human Rights Capacity through Innovative Legal Education Delivery is a four-pronged project that began last September, funded by the European Development Fund. The project includes UWI courses on international human rights law and the international human rights clinic; public outreach; development of legal advocacy strategy; and “train the trainer” workshops for civil society groups and lawyers.

One of the outreach activities, a secondary schools’ Human Rights Advocacy Training and Competition, will hold its finals and closing ceremony on April 21.

Dean of the Faculty of Law Rose-Marie Belle Antoine said in an April 13 interview at her office that the clinic was her brainchild. A former commissioner of the Inter American Human Rights Commission (IAHRC), Antoine conceived of the clinic because legal education does not automatically create lawyers who work in human rights.

“There’s a difference between what I can do [as an individual lawyer] and what an institution can do. When I was at the commission I saw how [effective] a clinic and NGOs can be when they work together. The IAHRC has helped to bring down dictatorships.”

Antoine said, “I see law as a social engineer that should be centred in the community. If we don’t shape [law students] they go out there and make money and that’s it. Law has so much potential for real positive change, like what we saw yesterday,” Antoine said, referring to the epoch-making legal judgment in Jones v Trinidad and Tobago delivered on April 12 in the High Court.

After a tender process, the faculty received $1.4 million in funding for the two-year project Strengthening Trinidad and Tobago’s Human Rights Capacity through Innovative Legal Education Delivery. Antoine said the clinic would continue beyond the life of the project, although this was its introduction.

Through the new courses, introduced, as electives, small, closely-supervised classes of law students have been researching human rights topics; this semester they’ve worked on refugees and migrants, Antoine said. “We need to get more and more attorneys involved. The idea is to get the attorneys working with faculty, students and NGOs.”

This year’s project outreach included a visual arts competition and a moot court for secondary schools. For the past term the students participating worked on child rights.

“The training is a lot of work – to learn about human rights law and instruments and the actual mooting techniques,” said Omar Mohammed, the communications manager for the project. “The idea is that the participants take two sides and do a moot debate.”

For the visual arts competition students could make any kind of art on any kind of child rights topic, said project manager Keisha Garcia in a subsequent phone interview this week. The moot court, however, was restricted to the topics of denial of access to education, child labour, and treatment of children in the criminal justice system.

For the moot court, the 13 two-people teams from eight schools researched and practised legal arguments with support from the Faculty of Law clinic. Just like real lawyers, they made written submissions before the moot court, Garcia said. At two training and mentoring events in February and March, the students got hands-on help from about 30 practising lawyers, law students and the competition’s technical leads, law-school lecturers Timothy Affonso and Afiya France.

“What we wanted to foster is greater advocacy for children’s rights,” Garcia said.

The competing schools in the moot court are: Mason Hall Secondary School, Speyside High School, Hillview College, ASJA Girls’ College, Queen’s Royal College, Naparima Girls’ High School, ASJA Boys’ College and Northgate College.

They will engage in the preliminary round of debates tomorrow; the winners move to the semifinal round on Saturday morning at the Law Faculty’s Noor Hassanali Auditorium at the St Augustine campus.

The finalists are scheduled to have their moot court around lunchtime before the closing ceremony at 1.45 pm on Saturday. The final round and the closing, at which prizes will be given out, are open to the public.

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