Past Projects

Cambodia
Since 1994, the Center for Law and Global Justice has assisted the Royal Cambodian Government in rebuilding its law-related institutions destroyed during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. Funding has been provided primarily by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as well as by money from private foundations and contributions from the governments of Australia and Japan. Highlights of that work include:

Cambodia Leadership Development Program
Starting in 1994, 21 Cambodians with some prior legal training (typically interrupted by the Khmer Rouge regime) and education participated in a six-month program developing critical thinking skills, learning English, and taking law courses at USF School of Law. Six months were spent in Cambodia, followed by six months in San Francisco. In addition, three Cambodians, including the Dean of the Faculté de Droit earned Master of Laws degrees at USF.

Cambodia Law & Democracy Project
Law Program at the National Institute of Management (Phnom Penh): The Center helped develop an independent, practical law program relevant to modern Cambodia. The result was a tuition-generating program designed for working adults. We developed textbooks in Khmer and English covering the Cambodian Constitution and government, contract law, the law of business organizations, commercial transactions, property law, marriage and family law, women and the law, election law, alternative dispute resolution and arbitration, labor law, disability rights, and children and the law. We trained Khmer teachers and taught several thousand students basic rule of law principles. A Career Placement Center was established to place students in jobs after graduation and language labs were developed to help teach English to University students.

Cambodian Community Legal Education Center Founded in 1996, the Cambodian Community Legal Education Center offers courses to adult Cambodians. More than a thousand adults have taken courses such as Commercial Law, Law of Marriage and Family, Property Law, Women and the Law, Elections and the Law, and Labor Law. The courses are tailored for the needs of working adults with regard to content, time of offering and level of complexity. The Cambodian CLEC is now a self-sustaining Khmer institution. Cambodia Legal Education Materials

Training for the Cambodian Bar Association: In Cambodia, students who meet certain minimal requirements are admitted to the Bar after a prescribed course of study. The Center helped train individuals seeking admission to the newly formed Cambodian Bar Association in an eight-month course taught by USF faculty and international foreign experts focusing on Cambodian and ASEAN Commercial Law and International Criminal Law. This course was repeated annually for several years.

Cambodia Genocide Program: USF, working with Yale University played a pivotal role in helping Cambodia as it struggles with establishing a mechanism for determining responsibility for the Khmer Rouge holocaust. The first phase of the Cambodian Genocide Program, funded by USAID, documented the atrocities. The second phase trained Cambodians to develop and participate in a judicial examination of responsibility. The training focused on international criminal law and forensic evidence to prove genocide and crimes against humanity, and included mock tribunals and discussions with the Cambodian government.

The report to our funder, the Open Society, describing the Genocide Justice Training Program is attached. Additional materials available on request.

Election Law and Judicial Training: The Center helped train individuals in election law to ensure free and fair elections, prepared materials detailing international and national election laws, and conducted seminars. Seminars for judges, modeled on the Center’s Judicial Training Seminars in Vietnam, have trained over 100judges and judicial staff. Cambodia Judicial Training Materials

Indonesia

Center of Community Legal Education
Modeled in part on the Cambodia Law and Democracy Program, this partnership with the University of Udayana Fakultas Hukum in Eastern Indonesia trained local government officials in contract law and financial reporting requirements; business people in banking law and international trade; judges in debtor-creditor and bankruptcy law; prosecutors in intellectual property rights and white collar crime; attorneys in commercial law and critical thinking; and the general public in forms of doing business and basic contract law; and all of these audiences in professional/ business ethics and alternative dispute resolution. The long-term goal was to strengthen Indonesia’s legal system, thereby assisting in its economic growth and progress towards democracy.

Environmental Law
During the summer of 2001, following a course in Asian Environmental Law, seven USF law served a three-week internship in Indonesia with the World Wildlife Foundation. In Indonesia, they participated in a seminar on Environmental Law at the Center for Commercial Law and Economics at Udayana University. They worked with the Nature Conservancy's to develop legal tools in support of the zonation plan for Komodo National Park, and to develop a legal premise for the allocating exclusive user rights for fishing communities. They developed a manual on Park rules and regulations related to destructive fishing practices; identified loopholes in the prosecution of cyanide use in fishing; and made recommendations on the issue of the burden of proof.

Vietnam

Judicial Training- Civil Court
With funding from the Dutch aid agency NOVIB, the Center developed and presented “Decision-Making in the Courts: The Civil Case” training sessions for more than 200 Vietnamese judges. Conducted in cooperation with Vietnam's Ministry of Justice, the Hanoi Law University, and the National University of Vietnam College of Law at Ho Chi Minh City, the training addressed decision-making in the civil courts and in labor and employment cases. The content was focused on implementing a "rule of law" in judicial proceedings; determining facts in the judicial process; and applying facts to the applicable law, including a workshop on rendering oral and written decisions in judicial proceedings. Following the training sessions focused on decision-making generally, the Center trained over 100 judges working in Vietnam’s Labor Courts in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

See also:
Judicial Training Seminar: Decision-Making in the Civil Courts, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, July 14-18, 1997.
Labor Law Training Materials

Judicial Training – Vietnamese Supreme Court
Under a commission from the United Nations Development Project (UNDP), the Center’s Jeffrey S. Brand and Judd Iversen, along with Danish judge Soren Axelsen, helped the Vietnamese government develop training for its judges and court staff. The need for training was identified by a team of Vietnamese experts, who found that, while the majority of court professionals are properly educated with impressive legal backgrounds, their effectiveness was limited by issues such as staffing and workload, judges’ need to update their knowledge of newly enacted laws, and the skills of legal inspectors and court clerks.. The Center team met with Vietnamese justices, judicial trainers, high-level officials and academics and presented a detailed report with specific recommendations to the Vietnamese Supreme Court.

Faculty Exchange with the National University Ho Chi Minh City College of Law
The Center facilitated a faculty exchange with the National University Ho Chi Minh City College of Law. The exchange, funded by the State Department (formerly USIA) brought Vietnamese professors to the law school. In exchange, USF law faculty traveled to Ho Chi Minh City presenting seminars ranging from “The Art of Teaching in Law Schools” to Administrative Law. The exchange lasted for three years from 2000 through 2003.