Human Rights Clinic

 

The FAU Human Rights Clinic (HRC) is an interdisciplinary human rights practice project in which students produce an “expert opinion” on a current human rights issue over a period of one year in cooperation with a practice partner from the NGO scene. The HRC is a collaboration of the professorships for Public Law, Migration Law and Human Rights (Prof. Dr. Anuscheh Farahat), International Politics of Human Rights (Prof. Dr. Katrin Kinzelbach) and Public Law, Public International Law and Human Rights (Prof. Dr. Dr. Patricia Wiater).

The project of the first cycle was titled “Admission of Afghan Local Staff in Conformity with Fundamental and Human Rights“. From October 2021 to July 2022 and in cooperation with German NGO “PRO ASYL”, the team of five students of law and political science researched the legal and factual issues of the evacuation of local Afghan staff to Germany in summer 2021 after the Taliban took power.
Accompanying the independent research work, the HRC program included various competence workshops with international speakers, in which organizational, content-related and methodological competencies were taught. The results of the study were published in an extensive Expert Opinion here (in German only).

The second HRC project cycle is currently running. The practice partner of the 2022/23-cycle is Germany’s national human rights institution, “Deutsches Institut für Menschenrechte“. Under the title “Climate Change and Forced Migration: Protection for ‘Climate Refugees‘?“ the students are researching how persons fleeing the negative effects of climate change can find legal protection. What forms of protection already exist in national and international asylum and refugee law? Are these forms of protection sufficient? What innovative approaches could close the existing gaps?

Detailed info on the Human Rights Clinic 2022/23 can be found here and in this 

StudOn course: https://www.studon.fau.de/crs4603194.html

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the coordinator of the Human Rights Clinic, Jonathan Kiessling: jonathan.kiessling@fau.de.