April 29, 2008
WCL conference explores the role of law schools in human rights
AU’s Washington College of Law is a leader in promoting and protecting human rights. That status made it the perfect place to host a conference last week that explored the role law schools should play in the field, and examined how institutions overseas approach the issue.
WCL professor emeritus Michael Tigar kicked off the event Monday night with a speech entitled “Four Levels of Understanding in Clinical Human Rights Teaching.” The next day, WCL professor Rick Wilson, director of the school’s international human rights clinic, led a panel at which speakers from Pakistan, China, Chile, and France discussed approaches to teaching human rights in their respective countries.
“Clinical education is a new trend in China’s law schools,” said Teng Hongqing, a professor at South China University of Technology. “Students touch the issues in real life, not from a book. Human rights demands professors capable of foreign languages and familiar with international cases and conventions. In China, there are not such many talented professors.”
The cost of clinical education is another challenge, Teng said, but there are about 20 law schools throughout the country that teach human rights.
“The law school should play an important role in human rights education,” he said. “To this end law schools should not only offer knowledge, but also offer the possibility for students to participate in human rights development and enforcement.”
Jorge Contesse of Universidad Diego Portales in Chile spoke about cultural differences in approaches taken to teaching human rights.
“In Latin America there isn’t this sharp distinction that one finds here in the U.S. between clinical professors on the one hand and stand-up professors on the other,” he said. “The folks who set up these clinics play both roles. In 1996–97 a number of Latin American law schools decided to establish a human rights and public interest law network. These networks started to meet every year and deal with issues like freedom of expression.
“Law schools began to engage in public affairs,” Contesse said. “This had a twofold effect. It brought clinical education into the mainstream. With these human rights clinics dealing with public issues, faculty members decided this was not a bad idea. Mainstreaming allowed human rights clinicians to have a more authoritative voice when the discussion about reforming law school curricula started in the mid-90s. This led to an increasing interest from students. They saw it was possible to use the law as a way to think, ‘If things are generally or structurally wrong, maybe we can do something about this.’”
The human rights center at the University of Peshawar is the only one of its kind in Pakistan, said Professor Nadeem Azam.
“The center was established so that primarily we would offer diploma and certificate course work in human rights,” he said. “Ultimately this was meant to be converted into a full-fledged department. [Classes] are offered within specific areas like humanitarian law and refugee law, since Pakistan has the most number of refugees in the world. Environmental law is another major concern in Pakistan; pollution is a major problem. Whenever you talk of human rights, they feel as if it’s the West talking to them. It’s not an Islamic concept. In order to make them more open, we also offered a course titled Islam and Human Rights.”
Other panels during the conference included “Human Rights in the Law School Curriculum,” and “What Law Schools Should Be Doing But Aren’t.”
