Off to SPLIT (Croatia)
This week I continued working on the compliance work regarding procurement and the travel policy. A significant amount of my time was spent working on the website, fixing much of the formatting and problems on the site that made it difficult to navigate the site well.
IBJ wants to put more of an emphasis on supporting Women JusticeMakers. The justice makers program is when IBJ helps fund individuals in developing countries who are inspired and have an idea on how to solve legal/justice issues in their community. In order to increase the work that women have done as JusticeMakers I was asked to find potential donors who want to help support women making a difference and to begin applying for legal grants so that we can help facilitate women making justice around the world.
One of my main projects that I will be working on for the entire summer is creating a legal aid manual for Lawyers, Judges, Policemen, an Individuals in Sri Lanka. This manual will identify key legal rights and aspects of the law that protect people and uphold the integrity of the legal system. This week Gabby and I were put in touch with a professor at a law school in the UK who will help us with this research and put together the grant. We’ve started by beginning to analyze the constitution as well as the criminal code. What immediately stood out to me was how much different the laws were in Sri Lanka compared to the US. The constitution was much longer than the US Constitution and there were more examples in the penal code. It also felt like where in the US there are broad rights that are expressed in the constitution, the Sri Lankan constitution had to explicitly identify each criminal act. It seemed more like a penal code of laws than a constitution in the American sense.
I also spent time reviewing annual reports and financial statements and summarizing them so that we could use the information in other proposals. Lastly, I sent out invitations to our UN Human Rights event on June 25th to about 40 different embassy’s/ambassadors. I’m looking forward to the event.
I took off work on Friday to go on my first out of country trip of the summer. With some friends who I’ve met through an intern networking event we traveled to Split, Croatia at 6 in the morning. It was such a ridiculously early flight, one of my friends, Rob, slept through it and missed the entire trip. We arrived in Split before 9 am and had the entire day to work with. We took a ferry to an island Vis, which took about 2 ½ hours, but was beautiful weaving around all of the Croatian islands, it was the furthest island from the mainland. The island used to be a military base closed to the public from world war two until 1989. That meant that there was a ton of nature on the island and relatively little trash and litter. The water was crystal clear and you could see all of the white stones on the beach. We visited Stiniva, which was rated the best beach in all of Europe in 2016, we had to hike down a trail and into a cove to get there. The hiking was worth it because it caused the beach to be much less crowded than expected. The second day we visited a fort on the island as well as a 450 year old church on the highest point of the mountain (not including the active NATO base) and had a great view all over the island. We returned to Split Saturday night and did a bar crawl exploring all of these cool bars, one was under a huge stone building and another was on the beach. We left Croatia early Sunday morning and spent the afternoon at a food festival in Geneva and then at the UN Beach Club where we paddle boated in lake Geneva. Overall it was a very action packed but relaxing way to end the week.