Just wanted to give a shout out to IBJ Summer 2008 Intern Bettina Roberts for being the poster girl for Duke Law’s Public Interest Program. Because of her unique experience - culminating in the training of 100+ Indian legal aid lawyers (photos) - Bettina was profiled by the Duke Law communications department.  An excerpt is below…

–

Bettina Roberts ‘10
Roberts, a JD/LLM student, tells how her summer internship with the Geneva-based nonprofit International Bridges to Justice led her to India.

Bettina Roberts ’10 knew she’d be spending the summer working abroad in her pursuit of a JD/LLM in international and comparative law. But when she boarded a plane for Switzerland for a job with Geneva-based nonprofit International Bridges to Justice (IBJ), she had no idea how multinational her summer would be.

“I’d been to Geneva before and I speak French, so I knew I wanted to go to there,” she said. “I also knew I was interested in criminal law. Other than that, I didn’t really have any criteria. And when I went in to work on my first day, I had no idea what I’d be doing. I definitely didn’t expect to end up in India.”

She also didn’t expect to help plan a training seminar for more than 100 legal aid defense attorneys in India. The training is especially important there, Roberts said, because there is very little public funding for defense attorneys representing indigent defendants, and very few attorneys who focus only on legal aid work.

More…

Though most of my internship revolved around the implementation of criminal justice in India, a recent trip to a West Bengali hospital reminded me of the other aspects of human rights enshrined in international legislation.

According to the Belur Sramajibi Hospital,  “The right to health is a basic human right as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948. India is one of the signatories to the coveted international charter and has promised to protect the rights of its people by virtue of giving assent to this charter. The Indian Constitution also guarantees the right to life, but considering the high cost and lack of medical resources, health rights has become almost a forgotten, if not alien, term to the common people.”

Please turn captions on while view images.

As a photographic intern for International Bridges to Justice, this is my first post on their blog. Last weekend I visited a small village near the Bangladesh border called Murshidibad. It is an isolated region of West Bengal along the banks of the Padwa River. It took us several hours on a train, followed by another two hours in a small cramped van just to reach the village. Upon our arrival we were greeted by kind people with open arms who wanted nothing more than to tell us their stories. We spent the next six hours of our day interviewing person after person. Listening to the never ending flow of human tragedy made it hard to put together even a simple presentation. I feel that the pictures speak more than words, however, each photo does have a small caption to help you understand what is happening.