BABSEA CLE works globally to connect people, organisations, and resources at the government, non-governmental, institutional, and grassroots levels through clinical and community legal education programmes. These partnerships empower vulnerable and underserved individuals and communities by creating and strengthening sustainable legal and human rights education, and access to justice programmes worldwide.

If you are interested in learning more about how to support or attend the Conference, please contact probono@babseacle.org.

More details including registration links and session details will be posted soon.

Please email your enquiries to Bruce Lasky, BABSEA CLE co-Director & co-Founder at blasky@babseacle.org

* Special guests Frank and Melissa Bloch visit Viet Nam * Visiting Volunteer Clinician Liubou Krasnitskaya in Hanoi * Visiting Clinicians David McQuoid-Mason and Luba Krasnitskaya * The First BABSEA CLE Singapore Conference * Indonesian Law Lecturers on Externship in Thailand * A Special Relationship with Central European University * Bruce Lasky reports from USA Pro-Bono Conference * FLP-CLE in Laos holds an important planning workshop * University of Malaya representatives at Singapore Conference *  Hien of Hanoi is star speaker in Indonesia * Chenda of Sustainable Cambodia reports on his Experience in Thailand * Pim”s adventure in Australia Part I * Pim’s adventure in Australia Part II * Australian profs report on Externship in Chiang Mai * Wendy Morrish reports on capacity building in Thailand * Externship Conference in USA. * FLP Laos Holds 1st Job Fair * A Law Dean in Viet Nam says CLE offers Career Guidance

But a recent trip to Thailand opened her eyes to the problems facing hundreds of thousands of Thai people without nationality.

“There are about 400,000 people in Thailand without nationality at the moment,” Ms Sieradzan said.

“A lot of births were never recorded so many Thais have no documents legally identifying who they are.

“It means they can’t travel or gain citizenship. I was hit by how big of an issue it is.”

Ms Sieradzan, 24, was among 13 QUT Bachelor of Laws students who spent three weeks in northern Thailand in January with community legal education group Bridges Across Borders South-East Asia (BABSEA CLE).

The project is among six study overseas short-term mobility programs that received $121,000 of funding from the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations for 2012.

The successful programs, spread across law, health, creative industries and science and engineering faculties, range from visiting aerospace engineering companies in Italy and Germany to improving community nutrition in Vietnam.

QUT International Student Mobility manager Nicole Patterson said the programs were in high demand among students who wanted the career edge of international experience.

“More and more students want to take part in these kinds of international short-term mobility programs,” she said.

“These experiences open students’ eyes to new ways of thinking, new cultures and link them with our partner institutions all over the world.

“Employers are looking for graduates with these intercultural skills and it creates opportunities for students to work internationally.”

Ms Patterson said the programs particularly appealed to students who weren’t able to go on semester-long exchanges because of financial constraints or course demands.

“Because these programs are subsidised up to $2000 per student, they’re more financially accessible,” she said.

“These programs are providing opportunities for a greater number of QUT students to have an international study experience.”

QUT is working to have 10 per cent of graduating students leave with international study experience by 2016.

For Ms Sieradzan, the chance to help Thai university students improve their legal skills, while learning about social justice issues was a smart move.

“It broadens your horizons a lot. I’d love to work in social justice in the future and it’s really inspiring to see people trying to tackle issues like nationality,” she said.

Students interested in study overseas short-term mobility programs should contact their faculty for more information.

(original article was published http://www.qut.edu.au/about/news/news?news-id=40215)

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Learners developed a Mission Statement and then considered their Strengths and Weaknesses in fulfilling this mission. Then they discussed ways to make their strengths stronger and to find advantages in the weaknesses they had identified. For example, they listed their lack of experience as a weakness but also recognized that this enables them to be open to new ideas.

As challenging as this sounds, CLE law students and lecturers enthusiastically tackled the second day’s work of making detailed plans. They worked in groups to fill in the template of a strategic plan and outlined various activities that would help them meet specific objectives for five major goals: bringing the CLE program forward to an accredited course in the law faculty; opening an in-house legal assistance clinic; further developing their community teaching; fund-raising to meet financial goals and finally, internal capacity building to enable law students and law lecturers to meet all these objectives. The FLP CLE group is now well on its way to a detailed three-year plan written by volunteer law students and law faculty working side by side.

]]> http://www.babseacle.org/articles/laos-faculty-of-law-and-political-science-cle-strategic-planning-workshop-february-23-24-2012/feed/ 0 http://www.babseacle.org/articles/inaugural-singapore-clinical-legal-education-conference-on-march-16-2012/ http://www.babseacle.org/articles/inaugural-singapore-clinical-legal-education-conference-on-march-16-2012/#comments Wed, 29 Feb 2012 02:00:52 +0000 Dinah http://www.babseacle.org/?p=1098

Inaugural Singapore Clinical Legal Education Conference and CLE Community Legal Education Training of Trainers Workshop

by

Singapore Management University in partnership with
Bridges Across Borders Southeast Asia CLE,
Bridges Across Borders Southeast Asia CLE Singapore, and
Northumbria International Journal of Clinical Legal Education

Synopsis

The importance of pro bono work was emphasised during the Opening of Legal Year 2012, with the Chief Justice articulating the need to actively cultivate a culture of doing pro bono work.

It is against this backdrop that the Inaugural Singapore Clinical Legal Education Conference and CLE Training of Trainers Workshop are launched. The Conference and Workshop will serve as a forum to create opportunities for promoting Clinical Legal Education (CLE) in Singapore, the ASEAN region and the globe. The promotion of CLE ties in well with the expressed desire to revitalise Singapore’s pro bono scene.

CLE programs provide important legal and civic knowledge and help develop skills in the participating students and community members. Through CLE, students learn how to use the law to serve society, and the communities they interact with correspondingly learn to trust that the law will protect their rights.

The Conference and Workshop will introduce the CLE methodology. In addition to theory, the Conference and Workshop also have a practical dimension, and aims to provide identifiable means and methodological strategies to help strengthen and support CLE programs through an exchange of ideas between participants with the aim of exploring the possibilities to create a network of sustainable CLE programs in the region. To this end, there will be interaction with and sharing by current international and Southeast Asia CLE practitioners.

Papers presented at the Conference will be considered for publication in the International Journal of Clinical Legal Education.

Topics covered in the Conference include

• Rationales for undertaking CLE projects
• The various models of CLE
• Pedagogy of CLE
• Establishing and sustaining a CLE project
• The development of CLE in Southeast Asia

Topics covered in the TOT Workshop include:

• Introduction to CLE
• CLE methodology
• Making a CLE lesson plan
• Building community relationships

Inaugural Singapore Clinical Legal Education Conference

DATE: Friday, 16 March 2012
TIME: 9:00AM – 5:00PM
VENUE: Sinema, Old School Theatre
ADDRESS: 11B Mount Sophia Old School @ Mount Sophia #B1-12, Singapore 228466

CLE Community Legal Education Training of Trainers Workshop

DATE: Saturday, 17 March 2012
TIME: 8:45AM – 5:00PM
VENUE: Singapore Management University Executive Media Theatre Administration Building, Level 5
ADDRESS: 81 Victoria Street, Singapore 188065

Registration is FREE to both events.  To register, please email mlamy@babseacle.org and dinah.chung@babseacle.org.

Workshop Wonders

By Lauren Donnison, Winter Legal Intern from the UK

During our first week as interns at BABSEA CLE we did a week-long training program at the BABSEA CLE house in Chiang Mai. This was conducted by the Laos team, Thip and Souliya, and the Vietnamese team, Ivy and Hien. On the first day we did a really fun scavenger hunt around the local neighborhood. This helped us to get to know the other members of our team, to find our way around, and learn to work as a team.

Ivy taught everyone the chicken dance, which she uses as her form of punishment for those who fail to do work on time. We had lectures about the different projects that BABSEA CLE are running in Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. These were very interesting and helped us all get a clearer picture of how BABSEA CLE works across the region and how valuable our work as volunteers would be.

We did some really fun activities on lesson planning. We had to prepare a lesson plan in small groups and then teach one of the activities we had prepared to the rest of the class. This was very amusing and we all had lots of laughs. We learned some really useful skills and techniques that will be very helpful when we go out and do some community teaching.

We spent a day learning about editing, which was kind of dull, but we were convinced by Hien and Ivy that this training would be vital to our role as interns because we will spend time working on the Vietnam CLE manual – a very important manual that will hopefully be used for law students in Vietnamese universities. 

It was a fun week and we learned a lot about BABSEA CLE. We made some great friends and we were all really excited about the next 11 weeks ahead of us.

As told to Bui Thu Hien

Team’s main missions was to further strengthen the clinical legal education programs in Vietnam under the UNDP.CLE project. In order to fulfil the mission, we have been providing capacity training for law clinics throughout the country. Capacity training consists of several different components, such as:

• Interviewing and Counselling Skills
• Supervising and Assessing the CLE Program
• CLE Textbook / Manual, Curriculum Devel-opment
• Debating Skills
• Budget and Proposal Writing Skills

These are all invaluable skills that law students need to develop for their future careers as lawyers and that professors must develop to become better teachers. Integrating these skills into the law curriculum requires us to use a different and creative method of teaching. Thus this ball has become an indispensable ‘co-trainer’ in all of our training workshops.

Let the ball tell you the story of its journey in 2011

“It’s been an extremely busy year for me. I have been to many universities all over Viet Nam with my team. This year has been a little different to other years because the development of CLE in Vietnam is at a new level. We are now at the level where we are focusing on training lecturers and senior students because we believe that at this stage of development, in order to progress even further, each university needs to have its own core team involved in establishing and running the law clinic and training new students and supervisors for the future. We want the universities to become self-sufficient in running their own CLE program.

“We also worked with each university to identify their specific needs and provide skills training tailored to these needs and we provided technical support too. When we very clearly identified the beneficiaries of the workshops, the class size was different among the different universities, as were the topics and materials we taught. So I never got bored because in each classroom I went to, the topic, skills, materials and the number of participants were all different. 

“Some of the places I visited included the Vietnam National University in Hanoi, the National Economic University, the Trade Union University, Can Tho University, Ho Chi Minh City Law University and the University of Economics and Law, Hue University and Vinh University. My job is to make the lesson more interactive and encourage students to talk. During brainstorming and Q&A sessions, I am thrown around the classroom and the person who catches me has to talk. I like listening to the students and all their ideas and I keep students awake because no one knows who will have to catch me next – and if they are not paying attention, I might accidently hit their face. I aim to make the class more fun and make the lesson more memorable for students. But I have to say, it does make me dizzy sometimes!

“My highlight of 2011 was the training workshop at Can Tho University in December. There were 15 young lecturers at a workshop on the CLE manual and CLE curriculum design and use.  Nearly half of them had not attended any CLE training workshops prior to this one. So when the CLE staff started throwing me, the beautiful ball, around the class, these newcomers were a little confused. But of course, it made them more interested in the lesson, because the way CLE teaches using interactive methods is very different, and I think much more fun than the traditional teaching method of lecturing. On the last day of the workshop, when the lecturers had to practice teaching chapters in the textbook, most of them used ME to assist them. I felt so happy and proud that we had taught these learners a new and more effective way of teaching.  One of the lecturers even told me that she wanted to take me away with her and use me in her law class. Obviously, I couldn’t do that – I would never leave my wonderful Viet Nam team, we are family now. But I did tell her where she could pick up some of my brothers and sisters who would love to assist her in her class.

“All the universities that have joined the CLE Network in Viet Nam want to achieve the target of having a CLE program as an official subject in the curriculum. Therefore, the workshops that have focused on supervision, assessment, textbook design and use were very helpful. They are not only about skills training but also give faculty members and students the bigger picture of how the CLE course will develop in the near future.”

Learning Life Skills and Legal Skills 

By Malaya students Ainnur Mardhiah Bt Wan Mohammed Azmi,  Darnisa Abdul Jalil, Don Stiwin Malanjum, Muhammad Syafiq Bin Salleh, Ahmad Zuhaini Bin Muhammad Amin, Nur Iffah Izzati Bt Musa, Nur Husna Najihah Bt Mohd Roseli

Our externship with BABSEA CLE in Chiang Mai was very exciting and interesting – even spectacular! We gained so much experience in only three weeks. The program exposed us to real Thai culture, tradition and lifestyle, in addition to teaching us about the Thai legal system. The skills we obtained are so enriching that, to talk about them, we’ve divided them into two categories: general skills and specific skills.

The externship taught us a lot of general skills, for example, about basic human skills. Living abroad for three weeks as a team with a limited amount of money, we couldn’t help but learn that every activity carried out had to be cost-effective, both money- and energy-wise. Although we were only interns, the workload was not light: we had tasks ranging from preparing lesson plans, to teaching at Wildflower — the local single mothers centre — to writing reports on workshops. Basically, our everyday life in Thailand was hectic. Therefore, to ensure our performance was cost-effective and energy-effective, we divided all our tasks strategically, so they could be done faster and better.

Another basic human skill we learned was communication. Interning for an organization that holds so many workshops meant we had to prepare presentations on topics as simple as prevention of HIV to as complicated as the effects of Free Trade Agreements on the spread of HIV/AIDS. Doing these presentations enhanced and polished our communication skills.

The preparation process mainly involved group discussions, which also improved our communication skills. Having discussions with group members of different cultures and backgrounds taught us how to speak in a way that was easy to understand. And, since BABSEA CLE is an international organization, we had an opportunity to work with law lecturers from Laos, law students and graduates from Thailand, and our fellow interns came from the United States, Australia, Canada, India, Singapore and the UK. Working and socializing with them also greatly improved our English.

As for specific skills, legal skills, we gained a lot of knowledge about the current state of Thailand’s legal system. By doing law-related tasks and attending numerous law-related workshops, like those on legal clinic and in-house consultation, we were able to identify pros and cons of our own Malaysian law. For example, we were told that in Thailand, although sex work is illegal, there is often no punishment of those involved in it. As a matter of fact, it is the most profitable sector of the economy. Moreover, the Thais have one unified and well-coded law that is binding on all citizens, whereas in Malaysia, we have two different legal systems, namely the civil legal system and the Shariah legal system.

BABSEA CLE actually has the same objective as the Community Outreach Program (COP) of our law faculty:  empowering people with legal knowledge. Hence, as BABSEA CLE interns, we were able to learn how international community overcomes issues of citizens lacking legal knowledge and having poor access to justice. We were exposed to how developed countries overcome these issues with systematic and sustainable procedures. In addition, we were equipped with human psychology skills that are vital in the effort of achieving the COP prime objective. For instance, we were taught how to encourage people to share all the information needed by active listening. We were also taught the importance of having a lesson plan and incorporating interactive teaching techniques into our community teaching, so that our classes will not be dull and tedious.

We were also involved in the Textbook Project. This is an initiative to compile at least 60 legal lesson plans in an orderly manner. As a result of this work, we will be able to use the textbook ourselves, as a guideline for community teaching. This textbook is really important for COP. Furthermore, we attended two workshops, an In-House Legal Training at Chiang Mai University and an International Debate Association (IDEA) workshop. These workshops exposed us to some basic skills necessary for our future law practices.

We were also sent to the King’s Project – one of the many projects established by the King of Thailand, in this case, to build dams. The workers need to have 200 bags of dirt to make two dams. Our team of seven combined to fill as many bags as possible with dirt during our morning shifts. We were given a translator-guide, a Thai law degree graduate, to help us in communication. In his free time, he was more than willing to tell us the history of Thailand and discuss Buddhism, politics and culture. In the evening, we went to the local school to ‘play’ with the kids. The students were in grades 1-3 and ranged in age from 5 to 12. The school does not have enough supplies. All we could do to help was contribute our energy and time to share with them our knowledge and love.

For Wildflower, we made lesson plans and went to teach on topics like Family Law, Awareness of HIV/AIDS, and the importance to having citizenship status. This gave us a chance to meet less fortunate young women and share with them the little knowledge we had. The learners were excited to have us teaching them because we also shared our experience with them. Most of them were less educated than most of us – but they had far more life experience.

Those are the highlights of the projects and activities we joined during the externship. We definitely gained a lot; especially, to be more grateful and respectful to people less fortunate than us. The externship experience was very useful to all of us. We not only gained experience working with BABSEA CLE but we also gained knowledge closely related to our own Community Outreach program.

A Laos Law Student’s Experience in Chiang Mai

By Pavina Thephithuck, FLP CLE, Laos

I’m a fourth-year law student at the National University of Laos, and in October last year, I was selected to be a member of the Laos BABSEA CLE team going to Chiang Mai for the Trio for Justice event. The Trio for Justice is an annual fundraiser to raise money to implement and support university-based CLE programs throughout Southeast Asia. Each year, the money raised helps support social justice causes throughout the region, such as migrant worker rights, the rights of people living with HIV, prisoner rights, juvenile rights, discrimination, the rights of stateless persons, access to health care, and the rights of transgendered persons and sex worker rights. But this year was special for the Laos team: BABSEA CLE pledged to give the first $5,000 from the “Trio” to my university’s CLE program! Right now, we have a community-teaching program, but we want to have an in-house clinic with real clients, so this event was very important to us law students.

I was really happy that I was chosen to go to Chiang Mai, as I knew it was a good opportunity to build knowledge and gain experience on how to run a clinic. I travelled overland to get to Chiang Mai, first taking a private bus to Udon and then a public bus the rest of the way. The journey was 15 hours but it did not seem too long. The buses were faster than travel in Laos, and I was able to sleep or listen to music most of the way.

Arriving in Chiang Mai was very interesting, as I had never been there before. I liked the weather and found the local people to be very friendly. The BABSEA CLE house was very warm – everybody knew each other, they were all friendly and they all wanted to help in any way they could.

I found Chiang Mai University to be very different to the National University of Laos. CMU’s library was a lot bigger and had a lot more resources. While they have more students and more teachers, they also have smaller class sizes. While I was at CMU, Professor Pannarairat Srichaiyarat, Director of the CLE clinic came out and spoke about how they run the clinic in Thailand. This was very informative and it was great to be able to ask questions.

The BABSEA CLE workshop was on supervising in a clinic, team management, office procedures and interviewing clients. We learned how to give advice to fellow volunteers acting as clients, about problems, how to resolve disputes and minimize any bad feelings. We also learned how to interview clients and give them advice about the law. We got a lot of information and learned about many new things. We spoke in Thai and in English, but we didn’t always feel we understood properly – we would have liked the workshops to go on even longer!

Of the entire “Trio” weekend, BABSEA CLE’s first ‘Access to Justice Fair’ was my favorite event. We got to meet lots of different legal organisations and social justice groups (for example, Burma Volunteer Program and Wildflower Home), hear them speak and ask questions. It was interesting to find out about the work they do as well as how their organization is run. I also worked on our information table and answered questions about CLE and the CLE clinic in Laos. People were very interested to find out about how volunteers go out into local communities to teach the people about the law.

I was a little apprehensive about working on the information table: although I’d worked on one before at the National University of Laos, I’d certainly never worked on one in another country! Luckily, attendees understood that we were not native English/Thai speakers, and asked questions in simple language. This allowed us to answer them effectively and a good experience was had by all. I’d definitely like to work on an information table for BABSEA CLE again. And we all would love for everyone we met at the BABSEA CLE house in Chiang Mai to come to Laos; you could give further training to volunteers here, and besides, good neighbors should visit back and forth!