Almost There
The past week was a busy one. Tim and I wrapped up with the IVEP contract and made much progress on the NCSC International Policies and Procedures. The training module (my first project at NCSC) entered the second stage, and we began finalizing the training manual and materials.
Two weeks ago, Tim forwarded our contract draft to general counsel Rob for review. We soon got back from Rob with helpful comments. Implementing Rob’s comments helped to further clarify certain sections and make the contract more logic tight. For example, in the limitation of liability section, we added language to preclude third party beneficiaries in order to limit the parties entitled to enforce the terms and conditions of the contract to only NCSC and the contracting party. We also revisited the language of payment section to make sure the non-refund initial payment provision does not conflict with additional payment provision at the termination. Other small modifications were made too to fine tune the language and organization of the contract. It felt so good to have worked from the very beginning of the project till the finalization phase. It is like building up a machine and now it is ready to go and we polish it up. After this contract, I have one last assignment to write another contract as a variation of this one. They will be used for different payment setups.
I have also worked closely with Tim on revising and updating the personnel polices chapter of the NCSC International Policies and Procedures. The older version of the chapter had two chapters on personnel policies: one for US nationals and third-country nationals, the other for cooperating country nationals. The new version aimed to consolidate the two chapters into one chapter applicable to all staff. There were also updates reflecting NCSC’s updated HR policies and treatment about “at-will” employment relationship. The personnel chapter is quite long compared to other chapters, a total twenty-one pages. Till last Friday, I finished revising and updating the chapter and completed the revision notes. I will go though the policies one more time with Tim tomorrow.
The training modules John and I have been working on are also in a good shape now. We started to finalize the slides since last week – putting them into separate trainer/trainee slides and adding answers to the fact patterns. I also finished an additional handout for the training module: “Criminal Justice Trends: Illustrative Examples from around the World,” in which an overview of illustrative criminal justice reforms around the world is provided for the trainer and trainee’s reference. The handout covers justice reforms in eight countries on different continents, and focuses on the criminal procedure aspect of the reform. It is very interesting to notice that while many Latin American countries have been transforming from inquisitorial system to adversarial system, there are some other countries (e.g., Australia, Philippines and South Africa) transforming their judicial system with added inquisitorial features because they found excessive adversarial proceedings have a damaging effect on the delivery of justice.
This is the last week of the summer internship. It is hard to believe ten weeks have almost passed by. I will be wrapping up with the current on-going assignment and hopefully getting all done by Friday.