Law event
Educating young lawyers to defend rights
Dr. Uttam Kumar Das
Respect, recognition and observance of human rights are to be promoted through progressive teaching and education. This is the responsibilities of every individual and organ as enunciated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 (UDHR). However, the formal teaching and education on human rights is yet to get a momentum in Bangladesh. That should be national priority for various reasons. Up to now, a few of the law schools are offering human rights as an independent course. Only a private university in Dhaka has so far introduced a two-year masters programme on human rights. Certain courses under the social sciences disciplines have incorporated the subject partially.
However, the quality and standard of the existing curriculum on human rights is not beyond question. Given the content, teaching methodology, exposure and practicality of the subject as an independent course, whatever I have studied at my LL.M. programme nearly 13 years back at a public university, now I could realise that that was something else but not a human rights course. I believe the same goes for others who are practitioners on the issue in Bangladesh now (and have had education at home).
Nonetheless, there are initiatives as well. And the foremost one is the annual two-week long teaching programme organised by the Empowerment through Law of the Common People (ELCOP), a research and advocacy NGO in Dhaka. The course is known as the Human Rights Summer School (HRSS), although it is organised during the winter.
This year (17 to 27 December 2008), the 9th session of the programme was organised at the Proshika Human Resource Development Center Trust at Koitta, Manikgonj. A total of 48 law students (who already have completed their undergraduate programmes) from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Iran took part in the course. The resource persons include renowned academics, researchers, practitioners and activists from home and abroad.
The curriculum is designed in such a way that theory and practical aspects are blended equally. There is moot court as well. As part of the programme, ELCOP has published a manual, which is a compiled volume of scholarly writings. It is edited by Dr. Mizanur Rahman, a Professor of Law at the University of Dhaka and the Director of the HRSS. The theme of this year's publication is “Human Rights: 60 years after the UDHR” which is very time-bound.
This year, International Organisation for Migration (IOM), United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) have collaborated with ELCOP to have their respective issues in the curricula of the course. According to ELCOP, the HRSS focuses on the development of advocacy skills among the participating law students so that they can, during their academic life as well as in the professional career, contribute to the securing of the fundamental human rights of the common people. The course aims to transforming the prevailing system of legal education to a more society-friendly form of justice education by providing the participants with a scope to supplement their training on issues relating to the fundamental human rights and freedoms.
On the background of the initiation of the programme, Dr. Mizanur Rahman comments that the traditional legal education (which covers human rights as well) in Bangladesh does produce 'traditional lawyers'. The existing curriculum and teaching technique are not aimed to produce human rights lawyers. However, there is a dire need for an alternative lawyering that will be pro-poor. According to Dr. Rahman, pro-poor lawyring means pro-justice lawyering.
To produce a pool of young professionals who will excel in human rights lawyering in near future, the HRSS is initiated. However, Dr. Rahman acknowledges that two weeks is not enough to cover what some one is to learn over three-four years. However, those who under go the course, their way of thinking, attitude, approach and judgment on a given issue is different from the others, he comments.
The good thing is that now almost all of the NGOs working with human rights issues in the capital have at least an alumnus of the HRSS. They are also joining the academia, judiciary, legal practices, UN agencies and international organisations.
Dr. Rahman lives with a hope which he loves to call as an “arithmetic dream”. His point is convincing: every year, there come out around 50 alumni from the HRSS. Among them, if, on an average, 12 to 15 become human rights lawyers, after next 10 years, there will be 100 to 150 of them in the legal practice in the Supreme Court of Bangladesh. Those through their 'rebellious lawyering' will definitely bring a positive change in the judicial activism in the country. This will contribute positively to the pro-poor judgments from our courts.
Dr. Rahman hopes to have his initiative translated into an institutional framework. Referring to the example of India, he recommends to the government for immediate setting up of universities and national centers devoted to law and human rights. Those would be center of excellence for studying and researching law and human rights from our own contexts. We need efficient practitioners and experts on the various branches of law and human rights namely international migration law, refugee law, environment law, trade law, criminal law, cyber law, health and human rights, HIV and human rights among others.
Those institutions will be a place to study law and human rights not from the viewpoint of text books only rather from the perspectives of real life situations and sorting solutions out.
The writer, an Advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, is a resource person to the HRSS.
