The Center for the Study of Humanitarian Law (CSHL) was established with the support of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (RWI) in August 2014 based at the English Language Based Bachelor of Law Programme (ELBBL) at the Royal University of Law and Economics (RULE). CSHL aims to be the leading university-based research centre in human rights and humanitarian law in Cambodia through rigorous research, high-quality education, and academic collaboration. To achieve this, CSHL Library provides support to students, academics and professionals for their studies and research by offering a friendly working space and providing specialized materials in human rights and humanitarian law.
CSHL Library is located at the 5th floor of the Library Building at RULE and is open for public access. With the support from RWI regarding book donations and database subscription, currently CSHL Library houses more than 1600 physical resources and subscribes to two online databases including the Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law and the Human Rights Law Review and other open access journals. Furthermore, CSHL Library’s resources are integrated into RULE’s Koha catalogue system where all RULE’s students approximately 3000 persons per academic year can access it.
Human rights materials provided by CSHL Library has been a great resource to develop our IHRL coursebook, which is already published and widely distributed both in-print and electronic version to students, academics, and practitioners. Without the library resources, our Australian and Cambodian interns who help us with the IHRL coursebook would not be able to conduct extensive research and draft a quality and research-based contents to develop the coursebook. This is the most impactful for human rights education in the long run.
RWI Cambodia always provides training to CSHL’s librarian by inviting professional trainers to teach our librarian about Human rights E-resources. In this regard, on 23 March 2017 Mr. Karl Adam, the RWI librarian from the Lund University, visited CSHL from 22-23 March 2017 to provide training and hands-on transfer of knowledge and skills in managing Human Rights E-Resource Platform using the Koha online catalogue system as well. As a result, in April 2017, CSHL Library collaborated with PUC University to develop an online Human rights E-resource.
Having received capacity building as mentioned above and other trainings, CSHL’s librarian has become a helpful resource for RWI to share her library knowledge with other librarians at partner universities in Battambang and Siem Reap and other partners that need library support from RWI. In addition to providing training to partner universities, we provide compulsory library’s training for newly enrolled students to ELBBL programme at RULE so that they are aware and familiar with CSHL’s library resources and space. We also provide a series of library’s trainings to students from other departments at RULE, upon requests.
CSHL Library provides a safe, modern educational space for students, academics, and professionals to further develop their understanding of humanitarian law and human rights law. As CSHL Library is an integral part of RULE, the library is a very good place that can provide important resources for both physical and online material, meeting space, moot courts pleading practice, which is the most appreciated part of the library for students.