Justice Education on the Agenda in Turkey.

Over 300 Meet in Turkey for Justice Education

The 8th Worldwide Global Alliance for Justice Education Conference (GAJE) recently took place on the Anadolu University campus in Turkey in cooperation with the Raoul Wallenberg Institute.

This year’s general conference theme was “Justice Education for a Just Society.”

The main goal of the conference was to provide law teachers, law students, legal practitioners, jurists, and social activists from around the world the opportunity to acquire new ideas, models, and skills for the use of education to promote social justice.

GAJE is an alliance of people committed to achieving justice through education. Clinical education of law students is a key component of justice education, but GAJE also works to advance other forms of socially relevant legal education, which includes education of practicing lawyers, judges, non-governmental organizations and the lay public.

In a range of plenary, small-group, and workshop sessions, 300 delegates representing 50 countries all over the world explored justice education as a concept for presenting, discussing, and creating innovative ideas for promoting social justice through legal education, including new and existing university legal clinics.

The Raoul Wallenberg Institute’s Turkey Programme promotes the development of clinical legal education programmes (CLE) at Turkish law faculties in close cooperation with the Global Clinical Movement.

Gamze“Achieving justice is a global concern, and CLE programmes all around the world are being used by legal academics as an important methodology of legal education to train law students, lawyers, and practitioners to contribute to this aim through education,” says Gamze Rezan Sarisen, a programme officer at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute in Turkey.

Within this framework, RWI’s Turkey Programme has been supporting and cooperating with Anadolu University Law Faculty since 2011 in developing their own clinical legal education programmes and in spreading the idea of CLE among Turkish law faculties throughout the country.

Legal academics from RWI’s other partner universities, namely Selcuk and Dokuz Eylul Universities, which are at the initial stage of developing their own CLE programmes, also participated in the conference to increase their knowledge on legal clinics and to acquire clinical methodology for their own clinical work.

Several representatives from law faculties at universities in Belarus also participated in the conference. The participants from the Legal Clinics at the Law Faculty of the Belarusian State University and the Belarusian State Economic University say the conference was beneficial for the further development of their own legal clinics and that they made useful contacts with experienced legal clinics in Europe and throughout the world.

RWI has been cooperating with several universities in Belarus on human rights issues since 2011. During 2015-2019, RWI will continue working with relevant legal clinics in Belarus with the aim of strengthening justice education.

 

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