You are here

Clinical Program

Human Rights and Migration Law Clinic (HRMLC)

Organization

The Human Rights & Migration Law Clinic is an initiative of the Institute for the study of Political Economy and Law (IPEL) operating under the remit of the International University College of Turin (IUC) in conjunction with the University of Turin ad the University of Eastern Piedmont in Alessandria. The Directors of the IPEL are Gunther Teubner and Joseph Halevi. The Clinical Program coordinator is Ulrich Stege.

Mission Statement

The Human Rights & Migration Law Clinic established a new style of legal education in the Piedmont region by encouraging students throughout experiential learning – learning by doing – for academic credit to emphasize the sensitization of students as future professionals to the problems of social justice and to foster a sense of social responsibility and furthermore, to provide research and the much-needed pro bono legal assistance to under-represented individuals and organizations within Turin, complementing the already existing support provided by local organizations working locally for the benefit of migrants.

The HRMLC is a one year program and is implemented with the support of the following partnerships and designed in the following way:

Clinical Program Partners

  • Institutional Partners

The HRMLC has been established by the International University College of Turin (IUC) in cooperation with the Faculties of Law of the Universities of Turin and the Eastern Piedmont University in Alessandria. They form together with the IUC the institutional partners of the HRMLC. The HRMLC is open to students coming from those universities, and the program enhances the cooperation between these institutions by using the synergies of their different activities, competences and structures for the benefit of the students and the local migrant community in Turin. The three institutions play a key role for the clinic management by connecting the clinical program to the actual curriculum of the universities, by choosing a motivated and competent group of clinical students, by defining the clinical priorities, by supervising the clinical activities and by determining and supporting the areas of research.

  • Associate Partners

Another important partnership has been signed with the Associazione Studi Giuridici sull' Immigrazione (ASGI), which has proven expertise in the field of migration law in Italy. ASGI with its associated and specialised lawyers plays a key role for the clinic through advising, supporting and supervising the clinical activities at all stages.

The clinical program is designed partially under the external placement model, where students will be placed at the legal aid offices (Sportello Assistenza Immigrati) of Italian Trade Unions and local Non-Profit Organizations working in the field of migration in Turin. For this purpose, the HRMLC has signed cooperation agreements with the Sportelli Assistenza Immigrati of the Camera del Lavoro di Torino (CGIL), Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), Confederazione Unitaria di Base (CUB), Ufficio per la Pastorale dei Migranti and Gruppo Abele.

In relation to the research component of the clinical program, a number of partnerships have been envisaged with the following organizations: European Training Foundation (ETF), Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, Forum Internazionale ed Europeo di Ricerche sull'Immigrazione (FIERI), International Training Centre of the ILO (ITC-ILO) andVIS-Volontariato Internazionale per lo Sviluppo. The clinical involvements of these organizations vary from the support of research activities (e.g. access to libraries and data banks) up to shared research projects.

Clinical Program Description

The HRMLC is an educational program and it is addressed to students as future professionals who are studying law at the law schools of the Universities of Turin and Eastern Piedmont University in Alessandria or admitted to the interdisciplinary master program of the IUC. Thus, this program involves a group of selected Italian and international students who are highly qualified and motivated and who wish to contribute to improving the access to justice of immigrants coming to and living in the local Turin area.

Clinical Activities

Concerning the clinical activities, the HRMLC is implemented in the following way: course work, seminar series, practical activity and research.

  • Course work

The first important element is the course work, which provides the clinical students during the entire program with the necessary theoretical background for the clinical activities in the areas of:

  • International and European Migration Law,
  • Italian Migration Law in Practice,
  • Legal Research and Writing

All elements of the course work try to provide the clinical students with a practical view into the issue by focussing on using particularly active teaching methods, such as case analyses and simulations. This course work is furthermore accompanied by a Clinical Seminar Series where professionals who are active in the field of migration are invited to speak to clinical students and provide insight into the practical problems related to legal practice in the field of human rights and migration.

  • Seminar Series
The IUC invites professionals and experts who are active in the field of migration both in Italy and abroad. The series focus on providing students with diverse perspectives from experts who come from different disciplinary backgrounds, such as law, economics, politics, administration or psychology. Thus, the series will give students insight into the practical problems related to practice in that field and will help them to gain a ‘helicopter view’ about the complex questions related to migration in general. 
 
Draft Calendar:
 

Date

Time

Expert

Title

9th April 2013

12.30-17.30

Clinical Programs of the Universities of Brescia and Roma Tre

Workshop on Migration-focused Italian Clinical Programs

7th May 2013

9.30-13.00

Roberto Beneduce (Center Fanon)

Psychological and Anthropological Aspects of Migration

May 2013 (tbc)

 

Azfar Khan (ILO)

International Migration Law and Policies

June 2013 (tbc)

 

Adam Weiss (AIRE Center)

Litigation at the European Courts

 

 

 

 
  • Practical activity

The practical activity is the key part of the clinical program and it has been designed in a format, which offers three different types of activities:

(1) Within the first activity, clinical students are working on real cases in the field of migration law. The students get in contact with their cases through weekly engagement in a legal aid office (“Sportelli Assistenza Immigrati”) for migrants of local Non-Profit Organizations / Trade Unions.

The students are working in couples (one international IUC student and one Italian student). They generally support the sportello with statements on specific legal questions. When the need for an attorney’s intervention is identified for an individual case, the clinical students prepare and connect those legal cases to the individual attorney. For the legal case, the clinical students assist the attorney in handling the case: by collecting all necessary facts, meeting with clients and preparing the legal solutions under the supervision of the sportello staff and the attorney involved.

(2) Within the second activity, a group of clinical students are involved in a practical legal analysis related to the Centre for Identification and Expulsion (CIE) in Turin.

In real terms, the clinical activities consists of studying the legal framework (European and national level) of CIEs, screening the presence of detained migrants, verifying the judicial protection of detained migrants and analysing the detention conditions. The objective is to investigate and analyse whether the treatment of immigration detainees in Turin’s CIE meets Italian, European and international human rights standards.

For more information related to the CIE project of 2011-2012.

(3) Within the third activity, clinical students will be involved in the actual preparation of one or two strategic litigation cases related to the detention of migrants. This strategic litigation will give students an opportunity to do comparative research, establish legal arguments and causes of action, judge whether there is a case to take to Court and learn about the legal processes that can be involved in running a human rights and public policy strategic litigation case.

  • Research

The third pillar of the HRMLC is a research component, which is being implemented by way of continuing research partnerships.
Betwixt and Between: Turin’s CIE is the product of the HRMLC’s 2011/2012 research component known as the CIE Research Project.  This report documents the findings of an investigation into human rights in Turin’s immigration detention centre, in which IUC students conducted first-hand interviews with current detainees, former detainees and professionals and volunteers who have contact with the centre.

As part of the research component of the IUC Clinical Program, two second year students (the Clinical Program Research Fellows) work to support the further implementation of a strong IUC research agenda in the field of human rights and migration. They take care of producing reports, papers and articles; they prepare a greater European research project on immigration detention centers; and they take part in research projects in the field of migration that are organised by partner organisations.

 
During the academic year 2012/2013, a Research Fellow is collaborating as a junior researcher at the International and European Forum of Migration Research (FIERI), where she is working on the European Migrant Integration Academy (EU-MIA) Project. EU-MIA is a research-based co-operative learning and training initiative targeting and directly involving public officials and other local stakeholders responsible for the development and implementation of local level migrant integration measures in European cities. The partners in charge of the implementation of this EU project (funded by the European Integration Fund) are: the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization (ITC-ILO), the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) of the University of Oxford and the International and European Forum of Migration Studies (FIERI).
 

For more information, see the paper presented at the Conference on "Clinical Legal Education in Europe" in Brescia 3rd February 2012 and the report of the clinical activities of the academic year 2011-2012.

For more details, see the following sections:

Value of the Human Right & Migration Law Clinic

Clinical Requirements

People at the 2011-2012 Clinical Program

Contact

The IUC Clinical Program is
supported by: