International Bridges to Justice is a legal rights NGO headquartered in Geneva, where I worked for a seven-week placement. From their offices in Burundi, Cambodia, China, India, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, IBJ trains and supports legal defenders, facilitate roundtable discussions between key justice stakeholders, and runs rights-awareness campaigns to educate the rural poor about their legal and human rights. Up to date, IBJ has provided prisoners in 48 countries with early access to justice and eradicates torture as a tool for confession. With help from the Laidlaw Foundation, I spent seven weeks working as a legal intern at IBJ’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.
Living in Geneva alone, working with an international team consisting of people from America, UK, Zimbabwe, and Europe in the headquarter have been a completely new teamwork experience for me. The headquarter in Geneva handled an unpredictable, multi-faceted range of work. It was fast-paced, and there were often urgent cases coming into the headquarter. Whilst our working language was english, I also put my Chinese language skills into use when helping with a legal reform project in China. My leadership skills were put to the test as I navigated cultural nuances to ensure effective collaboration.
I am impressed with the level of responsibility entrusted to interns. I was tasked with developing the IBJ Criminal Defense Wiki project from the very first day. Since then, I have been overseeing and participating in the process of researching legal codes and procedures, contacting international lawyers and universities and publishing the Criminal Defense Wiki in multiple languages. Ultimately, the project aims to codes, treaties, and case law to lawyers around the world, in particular those with little legal resources available.
The outcome of the project was surprisingly impactful. Initially, the local lawyers were perplexed as to how one can defend those who are wrongfully arrested in a system without a well-established court procedure and a robust human rights protection mechanism. Yet, IBJ’s online training for lawyers in developing regions like Tunisia taught local lawyers to strategically interpret different sources of laws gathered in the Criminal Defense Wiki to uphold human rights. Subsequently, there have been cases where they successfully influenced local judges’ attitudes by reasserting the defendants’ basic rights in the courtroom. This approach, though not easy, has cleverly developed the rule of law in developing countries in a benign and incremental manner. I felt as though I had contributed to the lives of those who were arbitrarily arrested during my time in the headquarters.
Cooperating with the diverse team in IBJ, I have also worked on various written pieces. This includes compiling and editing an exhaustive document about the work IBJ does in Cambodia and drawing up a major funding proposal for the FIFA Foundation Community Programme. We have created a football-related for incarcerated children in Burundi to raise legal awareness of juveniles’ rights. I was also responsible for updating and maintaining IBJ’s website and social media accounts and organising the IBJ’s Youth Justice Championship. These tasks allowed me to work closely with a team of inspiring people from different backgrounds and from all over the world. It also honed my leadership and teamwork skills through representing IBJ to potential funders and collaborators as a unified front.
Karen Tse, the CEO and founder of IBJ and a human rights lawyer, is an energetic leader with a strong vision and an open-minded attitude. Having talked to her, I was impressed by her audacity and robust resilience in pursuing the impossible dream of founding a charity to push defendant rights in places where political dissents were thrown in jail and tortured to confess. To her, changing the world means that one must hear the cries of the world. She would then take the pain within herself and connect it to a problem in society and transform it into structures that lead to a better world. Such compassion, confidence and tenacity echoed with my vision of leadership and motivated me to pursue similar humanitarian goals.
The enriching experience at IBJ, the various adventures and the friendships in Geneva were invaluable. Given the staggeringly expensive living cost in Geneva, I am deeply grateful to the Laidlaw Foundation for making this placement possible alongside the advice and support from the UCL Student Experience Team.