The Co-op
Experience
September 2007
Standing up for Liberty
in the U.K.
by
Alexandra Pray ‘08
I knew
before starting my co-op that Liberty
is “one of
the leading human rights groups in the United Kingdom,” but I
still had
little sense of what type of work I would actually be doing. When I started, I found myself in the middle
of a national controversy over whether the United Kingdom’s
Attorney General
had advised the Army to ignore the Human Rights Act in its treatment of
Iraqi
detainees. For
my
first assignment, I sifted through transcripts of the 1972 Parliament
when the
Prime Minister officially banned torture by the British government. I then reviewed testimony from various
officials so we could write a letter to the press, without violating
British
libel law, which would challenge the AG’s claim that he had never
sanctioned
torture as official policy. I had found
my dream job.
Iraq is one of the major
human rights
crises of our time and, though I explored the issue in my class with
Hope Lewis
last fall, I did not expect to be able to offer anything besides
academic
musings, especially as a legal intern. One
of my major tasks was to conduct research
on the rights of Iraqi detainees
under England’s
Human Rights Act for a case that will be heard before the House of
Lords this
fall. More than any of my other co-op
experiences, this assignment gave me the opportunity to apply what I
had
learned in my classes. There were
some
moments when I felt I was in over my head, and I don’t know how I would
have
handled it had I not been able to refer to an exhaustive source list I
compiled
for a research paper I wrote last year.
The most
challenging aspect of this job was my lack of familiarity with English
law and
international human rights protocols. Were
it not for the seminar I took with Hope
Lewis, I would have been
lost. I was assigned research tasks that
I felt were probably simple, but I would get confused about the
applicable
law. I like to think I can figure things
out on my own, so this experience was very humbling.
I had to ask for help, even though I thought
I sounded like a “numpty” (British slang for “fool”) half the time,
which of
course served me well.
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