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Description
One of the reasons for refugees and migrants being confronted with a difficult access to rights in Bulgaria and with negative public attitudes has to do with their lack of knowledge of local refugee and migration law. The Faculties of Law in Bulgaria do not give priority or offer at all regular migration and refugee law courses. This field of law is still not sufficiently clear to the students of law who will be future lawyers, judges and public servants. To address the gap, this project provides for the development and implementation of a training programme for 15 students and young graduates of law. The programme will draw on the model of legal clinics and will comprise of two parts: 1) a 3-month-long theoretical course of study, introducing to the fundamentals of national and international refugee and migration law and case law; 2) a 4-month-long practice, a working directly on real cases of refugees and migrants, who are beneficiaries of the legal aid of FAR’s lawyers. “Learning through doing” will help participants further develop their knowledge, provide them with professional skills and simultaneously help improve access to rights of refugees and migrants. Thus we will contribute to the creation of a future generation of legal practitioners who have experience in refugee and migration law. As part of their practical study, the participants will prepare 5 videos and 5 articles unravelling, in a user-friendly language, complex legal issues related to topical subjects from refugee and migration law. These final materials will be published online.
Summary of project results
The most important result of the project is the building of a community of trained young professionals with solid knowledge in the field of refugee and migration law. In this way, the refugee and migration community in Bulgaria is gaining a new generation of human rights defenders who will contribute to improving their access to rights. Within the project we trained a total of 22 young people. For the theoretical part of the training, during the 12 training meetings we relied on the inclusion of trainees not only as listeners but also as direct participants and navigators of the learning process - solving cases, participating in role-playing games and showing impressive commitment and activity. and attendance was high. The exam, as a training tool, according to the students, prompted them to recall what they learned and to fill in the blanks. More information about the materials prepared by the participants in the training can be found at http://www.farbg.eu/bg/defend.