Week 4: From Prague to Poznan
I have officially been in Prague for a month! It’s crazy to think how quickly this experience is going by. This week has been an exciting week as some of the projects I have been working on are approaching new stages in their development. The adjudication of terrorism case checklist/tool I’ve been working on has reached a point where it is ready for review by practicing judges. Myself and two other colleagues at CEELI met with Chief Judge John Tunheim of the United States District Court of Minnesota for feedback. Judge Tunheim has been actively engaged with CEELI in a number of projects, including this particular grant. He was involved in the training sessions that this checklist is tied to. After he provides some feedback to us, we will make adjustments and send it out to other judges who participated in the earlier training sessions to make sure the document makes sense and is a practical tool for judges. The end of the grant is the end of July, so we are approaching the deadline to have the checklist completed and sent to the printers. It is great to see the work I’ve been doing over the last month heading towards a final product. While it’s satisfying for me, I’m sure it is much more so for my colleagues who have been working on this for grant project for years. This checklist and their final deliverables are the last pieces of an impressive program to better prepare judges for addressing issues of terrorism.
In addition, I’ve been expanding the research I started last week on social media use by judges. Last week I spent a lot of time going through American sources of guidance, where this week I’ve shift to more international sources. For many European countries, their bar associations have not issued official guidance or policies in regard to social media use. The Czech Republic is actually one of the only that has official guidance. However, the European courts have in court opinions developed tests to determine if the use of social media reaches a point that compromises a judge’s ability to be impartial. While the United States various guidance refers to the ethical rules of the ABA and state bar associations, I am working on finding references to the European Court of Human Rights’ ethical rules in regard to impartiality, neutrality, etc. The goal is collect these resources from multiple jurisdictions and countries to create a social media guide that can be useful to judges globally. The greater references to multiple countries’ ethical rules and a greater understanding of ways that social media impact various judiciaries will help make it a more universal guidance.
This weekend I got a chance to go visit my brother in Poznan, Poland. Poznan is about 8 hours away, so I was able to take an overnight bus to get to Poland. My little brother is a member of the U.S. Air Force and is stationed in Germany. However, he’s spending a month in Poland as part of a U.S.-led military exercise involving 18,000 soldiers from 19 nations, primarily NATO members. The goal of the exercise is to apply pressure on Russia. For more information, check out https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/03/world/nato-exercise-poland-baltics-russia/index.html?no-st=1529496791. With him having spent the last two years in overseas bases and the three before that at a California base, my opportunities to see him have been low, so it was great to have a weekend to spend with my brother. It addition to seeing him, I got to add Poland to a list of countries I’ve visited and check out the adorable city of Poznan.
