special report
10 Obiter Dicta
ILP: Foundation for Human Rights Initiative
International Legal Experience in Your 1L Summer
W
mary owusu › ilp 2014 fellow
hil e s ome 1L s spent
their summers working in law firms or taking
courses abroad, I spent
this past summer as an International
Legal Partnership (ILP) fellow in Kampala,
Uganda working at the Foundation for
Human Rights Initiative (FHRI). Doing
everything from preparing memos to
monitoring death row proceedings, I
not only gained amazing legal research
experience as an intern within the
Research and Advocacy division, but I
also fell completely in love with Kampala.
Working Abroad
Contrary to some of the stereotypes associated with
student programs that involve going abroad, my time
at FHRI was not a vacation. I was not sitting on a
beach doing fluff work; I was in an office from 8:30am
to 5pm doing actual research and legal work. Within
my first week on the job, I was given a two-day deadline to prepare an in-depth memo on life imprisonment procedures and definitions within several
countries around the world. This research would be
used in recommendations the FHRI would be making
regarding a recent movement by the Uganda Law
Reform Commission for a revision to the Prison Act.
Another major project that I got to work on was the
Research division’s annual thematic report. For 2014,
the theme of the report was eradicating poverty in
Uganda from a human rights-based approach. Work
for this report involved weeks of desktop research
which was followed by interviews with government
officials, NGOs, and people living in poverty, as well
as field visits to
local slums and
various towns in
northern Uganda.
For the first
few weeks of the
internship, one of
the major tasks for interns in the Research division
was assisting with the monitoring of police stations.
On our visits, we followed an interview questionnaire which included talking with the Officer in
Charge to explain our visit - that we were there to
help and to simply monitor the human rights situation. After discussing details about the prison such
as capacity, forms of disciplinary action, number of
staff, challenges faced by officers, septic system, and
food access, we were able to walk through the station
and select prisoners to interview. Often conducting
interviews in a cell with over sixty prisoners, we
asked questions such as whether they had been taken
to court, the number of meals they had per day, their
access to drinking water, their sleeping conditions,
any abuse or torture they had experienced at arrest
or in prison, and if they had been able to contact their
family and friends.
Another research task that I was required to complete was looking into policing and human rights in
Uganda in preparation for a forty-five minute presentation that a member of the research team made
to the Uganda Police Force at a Uganda Human Rights
Commission conference. This research involved looking at the Constitution of Uganda to identify the
specific responsibilities of the
police and outlining the rights that
they are supposed
to be upholding.
One of t he
most intense experiences during my time at the
FHRI was monitoring the death row mitigation cases
occurring at the Uganda High Court. The mitigation
hearings were the result of a landmark judgment
from the Supreme Court, Attorney General v. Susan
Kigula and 417 Others, where the court ordered that
all prisoners whose cases were pending before the
appellate courts (this was approximately one-third
“...we were there to help and
to simply monitor the human
rights situtation.”
ê Mary’s international legal experience has not only left her with new skills to take in F