For a couple of months now I teach international human rights law in Doha. Although it is a course offered by the school of law, my students have many different educational backgrounds - from science and computer science to international affairs and law. This fact gives a challenging aspect to the course because on one hand you have to teach trained lawyers and at the same time you need to introduce the basics to students who have no legal background. Someone would think that the level of the course is lower than expected which is only half-way through to the truth.
Now that we are in the 10th week of the course and students are already familiar with the basic concepts and structure of international human rights law, I witness an unprecedented creativity on behalf of many of the students. The fact that they are 'outsiders' and they are not familiar with international law generally (this applies to lawyers too) puts them in a unique position. If you judge and assess this creativity according to typical (technical) standards only (i.e. is this the correct answer to my question?) it means that you are naive - at least in my view. Students have an extraordinary way to perceive the knowledge you are trying to convey to them and their questions reflect this.
The other day I was trying to explain that an international court provides for a remedy to victims when a given human right is violated. I gave some examples of the concept of remedy, like financial compensation etc., and then I asked if this was clear to them. A student raised her hand and said 'so, this is a way to give the human right back to the victim, correct?'. A trained lawyer would think that this is a silly thing to say and that you can never 'give the right back'. However, her comment left me speechless for a moment. It took me some seconds to realise that one could not come up with a simpler and more accurate way to explain the meaning of remedy.
Some days ago the students had for an assignment to identify positive and negative points of an international treaty on human rights. I gave to one of my students a 9/10 mark even though overall the content of the assignment was average. This is because he thought, wrote and suggested something that even lawyers would not think easily. He was criticising a specific provision of the treaty and he found natural to suggest that the various rights included in this provision should be broken down into two separate provisions, which by the way it was a very good suggestion. However, besides it being a good suggestion, it is not easy for anyone to re-arrange a given structure, which is the essence of creativity.
If you are not very careful, you can easily oversee this row, amorphous (yet) creativity. I, in my turn, there is not much I can do but keep challenging them and help them unfold their creativity on all levels. This is the video we watched couple of weeks ago :)
If you are not very careful, you can easily oversee this row, amorphous (yet) creativity. I, in my turn, there is not much I can do but keep challenging them and help them unfold their creativity on all levels. This is the video we watched couple of weeks ago :)
