2023-24

CLE course summer 2024 semester

From FLAS 36001 -   

LLAW3148/ JDOC6205 Clinical Legal Education (general stream)

January 2024 semester

from FLAS 35001 - 

The Human Rights in Practice course enables students to discover how human rights lawyers, advocates, and practitioners engage with human rights issues both domestically and internationally, through experiential learning. Students will engage substantively with different areas of international law and collaborate with select community partners on human rights projects. Students will explore and experience first-hand the relationship between international human rights law and the Hong Kong legal system.

The course seeks equip students with the skills and knowledge necessary to excel in the changing global legal environment by providing opportunities to work on cutting-edge international legal issues while serving the community.

The course aims to:

1. Expose students to the challenges and skills of acting in the role of a lawyer within the unstructured situations that international human rights lawyers confront in practice;
2. Expand opportunities for collaborative experiential learning;
3. Instruct students in the theory and practice of domestic and international human rights law, as well as comparative legal analysis;
4. Give students an opportunity to practice their professional skills and ethics;
5. Encourage students to identify and provide service for unmet legal needs;
6. Encourage critical analysis of the law, the relationship between international and domestic legal systems, and the different roles within legal systems; and
7. Provide students an opportunity to evaluate the real-life application and effects of international human rights instruments, as well as contribute to the promotion, progressive enforcement, and internalization of international human rights.

Specific skills taught include design of community legal education materials; collaborative and community-based lawyering; domestic and international legal research and analysis, including comparative legal research; human rights research; and legal writing.

Each term features different human rights topics and work depending on the needs presented to the Course Coordinator. One of the focus areas between 2023-2024 is Disability Rights – specifically on Conditional Discharge issues. Students will have the opportunity to conduct research on issues faced by patients placed under Conditional Discharge and assist with their appeal cases before the Mental Health Review Tribunal.