Week One: Jetlag, Glacier Lakes, and Indonesian Drug Law
Hi everyone!
This blog will document my internship this summer in Geneva, Switzerland with International Bridges to Justice. IBJ’s mission is to expand legal rights for individuals around the world. They focus on the right to legal counsel, the right to be free from torture, and the right to a fair trial. They have programs in countries across the globe that work to promote these rights. I’m very excited to play a part in the IBJ mission for a few months. 
I’ve been in Geneva for just over a week now, and it was already an eventful week at IBJ. Within a few minutes of connecting to the wifi at the office, I was helping draft a grant proposal for available funds from Lululemon (yes, the athletic clothing brand).
This was the first of a few grant projects I was assigned to this week. It’s been a lesson in NGO funding. IBJ searches for available grants from governments and organizations nearly constantly in order to keep its doors open. Each grant has specific goals and parameters, and IBJ submits a detailed plan to apply for each one. A week ago, we found a grant from the U.S. Department of State that is available to organizations working on detainee’s rights in Tunisia. I produced a document called a "Compliance Matrix," which essentially detailed the guidelines for the grant and determined whether IBJ fits them.
I then worked on the beginning stages of a project proposal for expanding IBJ’s operations in Tunisia. We spoke to a few other NGO leaders with experience in Tunisia as to what effective projects will look like given their experience on the ground.
It was an interesting exercise in marketing. Key partners for IBJ legal rights awareness campaigns and pro bono projects are local lawyers. I learned that in Tunisia, lawyers are reluctant to help with efforts to educate the population about their legal rights because they believe it will lead to less legal work and threaten their livelihoods. One part of the project is launching an IBJ app that connects clients to attorneys. The Tunisia experts were sure lawyers would be hesitant about the app. We wrote a program plan that will hopefully help persuade local lawyers that more education on legal rights means more legal work, not less.
On Thursday of last week, I was assigned to write a memo to Karen Tse, the founder of the organization, on current Indonesian drug policy prior to a meeting she had on the subject. I spent most of the day researching Indonesia’s Penal Code and sifting through data collected by human rights organizations on the subject. Indonesia has some of the strictest drug laws in the world. You can be sentenced to four years in prison for using narcotics (including marijuana). You can get life in prison for certain trafficking crimes and the death penalty for trafficking in over a kilogram of marijuana or over 5 grams of processed drugs. These policies have led to massive overcrowding in prisons. The police often accept bribes in exchange for lower-level charges. It was an interesting topic to research, and I received positive feedback on the memo, which was encouraging for my first week on the job.
Outside of Work This Week:
- Kristen (the other IBJ intern from William & Mary Law School) and I went for an inaugural swim in Lake Geneva. It was definitely too cold to swim, given that the lake is a glacial lake and it was probably like 60 degrees. .
- As a group of interns, we spent a lot of time finding a spot by the lake with a view of Jet’Deau to eat some pastries.
- On a rainy day, a group of IBJ ventured over to a bookstore cafe called Pages and Sips in Geneva’s Old Town and spent the afternoon working there.
- On our first excursion by train from the city, three of us went to Gruyére (like the cheese). We wandered around the town and explored the medieval castle.
