The Educational Value of International Humanitarian Law Clinics - The Leiden and Bochum Example

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The Educational Value of International Humanitarian Law

Clinics: The Examples of Leiden and Bochum

R H / L C

Abstract Teaching international humanitarian law can take many diﬀ erent forms but using clinical

legal education in this fi eld of law has proven especially successful. This article describes the benefi ts as well as the challenges of setting up an international humanitarian law clinic in the traditional teach-ing environments of the Netherlands and Germany. It highlights the experiences and best practices accumulated during six years of letting students of Leiden University and Ruhr University Bochum successfully conduct research projects with project partners like the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Netherlands or German Red Cross, as well as diff erent human rights NGOs and government agencies. It shows why students love participating in clinical legal education, and why this form of legal training not only enables students to apply their theoretical knowledge to practical situations, but also trains them in soft skills like teamwork, confl ict resolution and time management. Lastly, it shows that through setting up IHL clinics all over the world and being part of an international IHL clinic net-work, the authors contributed to having real impact on the further dissemination, implementation and enforcement of IHL.

Keywords International humanitarian law, Clinical legal education, Teaching method, Societal

im-pact, Dissemination and enforcement, International cooperation

Der pädagogische Wert der klinisch-rechtlichen Ausbildung im Bereich des humanitären Völkerrechts: Die Beispiele der IHL-Kliniken in Leiden und Bochum

Abstract Das Unterrichten des humanitären Völkerrechts (IHL) kann viele verschiedene Formen

an-nehmen, aber der Einsatz von klinisch-juristischer Ausbildung in diesem Rechtsbereich hat sich als besonders erfolgreich erwiesen. Dieser Artikel beschreibt die Vorteile sowie die Herausforderungen der Errichtung einer internationalen Rechtsklinik für humanitäres Völkerrecht in den traditionellen Lehrumgebungen der Niederlande und Deutschlands. Es hebt die Erfahrungen und „Best Practices“ hervor, die in vergangenen sechs Jahren gesammelt wurden, währenddessen Studenten der Universi-tät Leiden in den Niederlanden und an der Ruhr-UniversiUniversi-tät Bochum (RUB) erfolgreich Projekte mit Projektpartnern wie dem Internationalen Komitee des Roten Kreuzes, dem Niederländischen oder dem

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Deutschen Roten Kreuz, sowie verschiedenen Menschenrechts-NGOs und Regierungsbehörden durch-führen ließen. Es zeigt, warum Studenten die Teilnahme an einer klinischen Rechtsausbildung als sehr positiv empfi nden, und warum diese Form der juristischen Ausbildung den Schülern nicht nur ermög-licht, ihr theoretisches Wissen auf praktische Situationen anzuwenden, sondern sie auch in „Soft Skills“ wie Teamwork, Konfl iktlösung und Zeitmanagement schult. Schließlich demonstrieren die Autoren, dass man durch die Errichtung von IHL-Kliniken auf der ganzen Welt und Teilnahme an einem inter-nationalen IHL-Kliniknetzwerks dazu beigetragen kann, einen wirklichen Einfl uss auf die Verbreitung, Implementierung und Durchsetzung von humanitären Völkerrecht auszuüben.

Keywords Internationales humanitäres Völkerrecht, Klinische Rechtserziehung, Unterrichtsmethode,

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1 Introduction

For law students, studying law and practicing law often are two completely diﬀ erent worlds. With most European law schools focussing on the theoretical education of law students,1

based on the study of academic literature, national legislation and case law, they sometimes seem to lose sight of preparing their students for the practical application of the law. This gap between theory and practice was one of the reasons for American law schools to intro-duce law clinics into their curricula.2_{And although clinical legal education has been a valued}

teaching tool in the United States for many years, law clinics have not yet gained a steady foothold in Western Europe or other areas of the world. In recent years, however, legal clin-ics have also gained ground in the European context, ﬁ rst and foremost in the area of human rights and refugee law.

This article, however, will demonstrate that clinical legal education can also be a very successful tool for the teaching, application and dissemination of international humanitarian law (IHL) and should become a much more widespread component of academic curricula. The immense potential which lies in the setting up of IHL clinics at law schools all over the world will be demonstrated by the example of the current international cooperation between the IHL Clinics at Leiden Law School (Netherlands), Emory Law School (USA), IDC Her-zliya (Israel) and Roma Tre University (Italy). In this context, this article will especially draw upon the experiences of the authors in setting up, directing and running the IHL Clinic at Leiden Law School in the Netherlands, but also in initiating a new IHL Clinic at the Insti-tute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conﬂ ict (IFHV) of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.

Although this article is mainly written to show what big advantages lie in the growing popularity of legal clinics in the ﬁ eld of IHL for students, teachers and the international com-munity, it also wants to clarify that setting up and maintaining an IHL clinic can be a rather challenging endeavour if the respective educational environment is not completely support-ive of this teaching concept. In this regard, this article also seeks to serve as a practical guide for colleagues from academia (and practice) who are contemplating setting up an IHL clinic and are looking for best practices on how to make this endeavour a successful one.

In order to achieve these goals, this article will analyse the concept and the educational benefi ts of clinical legal education, its roots as well as its objectives in section 2. Section 3 will have a closer look at the specifi c example of the Leiden IHL Clinic and will demonstrate how the Kalshoven-Gieskes Forum on IHL (the “KGF” or the “Forum”) at Leiden Univer-sity has used its IHL Clinic to develop an almost complete circle of professional training in IHL. Section 4 explains the benefi ts but also the challenges of setting up an IHL clinic in a traditional environment of legal education like Germany, using the example of the Bochum IHL Clinic. Finally, section 5 will give a short refl ection on the experience of six years of directing, running and teaching two IHL Clinics in the Netherlands as well as in Germany.

1 Cf. J. Marson / A. Wilson / M. Van Hoorebeek, The Necessity of Clinical Legal Education in University Law Schools: A UK Perspective, in: Journal of Clinical Legal Education 7 (2005), p. 29.

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2 The Educational Beneﬁ ts of Clinical Legal Education

2.1 The Concept and History of Clinical Legal Education

There is no singular deﬁ nition of what exactly a ‘law clinic’ is. The phenomenon of clin-ical legal education was born in the United States, driven by two interacting forces. The ﬁ rst force was the recognition that purely academic learning may not always prepare law students for the very complex practice of law, as was already highlighted by Jerome Frank in 1933.3_{The second component was the fact that poverty denied people in need access to}

justice.4_{Under the supervision of qualiﬁ ed lawyers, law students started oﬀ ering legal}

assis-tance to people in need, in exchange for academic credit. Although one of the ﬁ rst known ‘law clinics’ already existed in 1893,5_{it was these forces that caused an increase in the}

popu-larity of law clinics, especially in the 1960 s. These more traditional law clinics both allowed law students to learn through experience and provided legal services and access to justice for people with low or no income, ‘exposing law students to legal problems faced by the poor’.6

Today, law clinics are a staple in the majority of American law school curricula.7

Al-though social justice aims are still present in law clinics’ missions, the focus has slowly shifted towards the development of lawyering skills.8_{The term ‘law clinic’ is now used for}

many diﬀ erent undertakings, ranging from legal aid for persons with a low income and in-suﬃ ciently funded organisations to classroom simulations and internships.9_{However, the}

core of clinical legal education consists of law students providing legal assistance to clients and taking responsibility for their work, in collaboration with a supervisor.10_Ultimately,

stu-dents receive feedback in order to reﬂ ect on their work.11_{Despite the value of simulations in}

the preparation of clinical work, some argue that a law clinic in its purest form oﬀ ers legal assistance to real-world clients only.12_{In this regard, it is important that a clear distinction}

is made between moot courts, which simulate court proceedings and usually the represen-tation of a ﬁ ctitious client in a ﬁ ctitious case, and law clinics with real-life clients and con-crete problems and assignments. From the authors’ own experience, one can observe that the motivation with which the students approach assignments when they come from real-word clients is enhanced by at least 100 %. Today’s students, especially if they are pursuing stud-ies in the area of international (humanitarian) law, obviously do not pursue this because they aim to earn a big salary at the end of their studies. They rather start their studies (often after having worked a couple of years in the corporate world) in order to have an ‘impact’ 3 J. Frank, Why Not a Clinical Lawyer-School?, in: University of Pennsylvania Law Review 81 (1933), p. 907. 4 S. Wizner, The Law School Clinic: Legal Education in the Interests of Justice, in: Fordham Law Review 70 (5)

(2002), p. 1933.

5 This was a student volunteer scheme at the University of Pennsylvania. MacCrate, supra note 2, pp. 1102–1103. 6 D. R. Hurwitz, Lawyering for Justice and the Inevitability of International Human Rights Clinics, in: Yale

Jour-nal of InternatioJour-nal Law 28 (2) (2003), pp. 523–524.

7 R. J. Wilson, Western Europe: Last Holdout in the Worldwide Acceptance of Clinical Legal Education, in: Ger-man Law Journal 10 (7) (2009), p. 826.

8 See D. R. Hurwitz, supra note 6, p. 524. 9 See R. J. Wilson, supra note 7, p. 829.

10 See, for example, J. Giddings, Promoting Justice Through Clinical Legal Education, Melbourne 2013, p. 14. 11 Ibid.

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later. Oﬀ ering them the opportunity to do so, already when they are still learning about the theoretical tools for a future job in the humanitarian ﬁ eld, usually sparks a special energy and motivation which cannot be observed in the context of regular coursework like papers or exams. As research has shown, intrinsic motivation can be crucial for being successful in young people’s study careers.13

Although law clinics regularly have a place in law school curricula in the United States, Europe (or at least Western Europe) has clearly stayed behind in the acceptance of clini-cal legal education. While in the United States good law schools advertise their ability to off er clinical legal education, in Europe the idea of including law clinics in the training of law students at the university level is often faced with hurdles which are hard to overcome, some of them administrative. One of the reasons for this might be, fi rst of all, that European law schools are faced with enormous amounts of new law students every year. With classes growing in size, it may be hard to off er every student a law clinic experience, as it would require a lot of human resources to have qualifi ed supervision for small groups of students in order to properly represent and counsel a client.14_{Secondly, numerous European countries}

already require a mandatory apprenticeship before admission to the bar and entry into the practice of law. In this regard, universities might not see the necessity to engage in the prac-tical training already at university level, although this kind of apprenticeship usually does not include training the practice of international law. Practicing lawyers who have already gone through this onerous process may feel threatened by a large number of law students getting involved in the practice of law.15_{The idea of students who have not graduated yet}

and have not yet been admitted to the bar giving legal advice to real-life clients, seems – from a traditional perspective – ‘dangerous’. Finally, European law schools often take pride in the academic – but highly theoretical – quality of education. In some countries, like the Netherlands and Germany, a clear distinction is made between ‘research’ universities on the one hand, and universities of applied science on the other. Usually, the latter do not enjoy the same reputation. This causes a hesitancy among law schools to let their curricula get too mixed up with practice, something that is more often reserved for the more practical universities of applied science, where students who graduate are not qualiﬁ ed to enter the bar or pursue a PhD. However, most of these hesitancies can be alleviated if a law clinic is well-structured and clearly delimited,16_{and an academic approach is chosen with regard to}

the quality control of the outcomes of the clinical work.

2.2 The (Educational) Beneﬁ ts of Law Clinics in General

Experiencing the law being applied to real-life situations while studying it provides a lot of benefi ts for students, and may ease their transition into the profession – but also might help them fi nd out whether (international) law is actually the fi eld they really want to pursue.17

The major beneﬁ ts of clinical legal education are (1) seeing the law in action; (2) develop-13 S. Saeed / D. Zyngier, How Motivation Inﬂ uences Student Engagement: A Qualitative Case Study, in: Journal of

Education and Learning 1(2) (2012), p. 252. Available at https://ﬁ les.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1081372.pdf. 14 See R. J. Wilson, supra note 7, p. 833.

15 Id., p. 834.

16 For a more elaborate analysis, see R. J. Wilson, supra note 7, pp. 831–839.

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ing skills by deploying them; (3) being confronted with questions of ethics and professional responsibility; and, as least as important, (4) the contributions a law clinic can make to a community.

2.2.1 Seeing Law in Action and Context

Most law schools primarily train their students in analytical reasoning. Students attend lec-tures and read books, and eventually learn to apply legal rules to a range of pre-set facts during an exam. The focus thus lies on the cognitive dimension of the law; on understand-ing what the law is; or to put it more simply: on thinkunderstand-ing like a lawyer.18_{Although this is a}

fundamental foundation for any law student, the law school curriculum often lacks in con-tinuing to build on this basis and preparing students for the practice of law, both in terms of skill training and instilling a sense of professional and ethical responsibility in them.19

Law clinics, in contrast, integrate all three aspects of legal training: (a) students get to em-ploy their legal knowledge, (b) apply it to real-life legal issues, (c) while improving their professional skill set and being confronted with challenges a professional environment can pose, both in terms of ethical dilemmas and social challenges. Clinical legal education thus allows students to build further upon their foundation of legal knowledge gained in regular courses, learning how to handle real-life legal issues and getting an insight into how the law functions in reality (and, sometimes, fails to function). In addition, law clinics also confront students with limits to the law, motivate them to look past legal solutions and take into ac-count the social context of a (legal) problem.20_{For IHL clinics speciﬁ cally, students not only}

improve their understanding in terms of the substantive law, but also gain knowledge on IHL’s most important institutions and its enforcement. This is something which they usually do not acquire in their normal studies in their home countries, since actors in IHL are usually not easily available for access. In addition, participating in an IHL clinic can reveal the inter-national and political contexts that usually complicate the workings of IHL. Probably every international (humanitarian) lawyer has faced the allegation that international law is not law, but just (power) politics.21_{All in all, law clinics show the workings of the law in practice in a}

way that classroom teaching and self-study cannot quite accomplish. 2.2.2 Developing Key Professional Skills

While seeing the law in practice, students get the chance to improve their professional skill set through learning by doing. Students deploy skills and hone them through self-reﬂ ection and feedback from their supervisors. First, when presented with the client’s legal issue, stu-dents will have to identify the legal problem, evaluate possible approaches to the problem and develop a strategy towards solving it. While working towards reaching this goal, stu-dents will have to engage in a legal analysis – studying the law, evaluating legal theory, case 18 R. Sandefur / J. Selbin, The Clinic Eﬀ ect, in: Clinical Law Review 16 (2009), p. 61.

19 Ibid.

20 R. E. Redding, The Counterintuitive Costs and Beneﬁ ts of Clinical Legal Education, in: Wisconsin Law Review (2016), pp. 63–64.

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law and other sources – and formulating a legal argumentation. This requires in-depth and effi cient legal research, but also a thorough enquiry into and an evaluation of the facts of the case. Instead of being presented with a selection of facts on an exam, students may have to investigate some of the facts or fi nd more details about them. As can be seen, students will have to employ and improve their skills in problem solving, legal analysis, legal research and factual research during a clinic project. Furthermore, throughout the entire period of the project, students will have to utilise their skills in drafting and legal writing. They may have to draft memoranda, briefs or reports and present their legal analysis and argumentation in a clear, concise and convincing manner. Students will also have to eff ectively organise and manage their time, both in terms of participating in a clinic alongside regular coursework and making the deadlines that are agreed upon with their client and supervisors.

One of the most important benefi ts of clinical legal education is that clinic participants will learn to work in teams, dividing tasks and fully utilising every team member’s stronger points. In this regard, in the authors’ experience, it is of much benefi t to let students par-ticipate in teams of three to fi ve team members. Under these conditions, the team is small enough so that communication and workfl ow go smoothly, but big enough to take into ac-count that, maybe under certain circumstances, one team member might be not able to con-tribute fully to the project. This is something, which needs to be considered constantly: while setting up an IHL clinic is, of course, mainly a didactic project for the benefi t of each individual student, the outcome of the projects is to serve a purpose of the cooperation part-ner or client. Therefore, at the end of the project, it is desirable to have a fi nal report, which can be submitted to the client. This puts both students and supervisors under a certain pres-sure, which is mainly to be seen positively, as it contributes to the overall seriousness of this endeavour. But one should not underestimate the challenges which arise if one student out of a team of three drops out, and the deadline for submission is two weeks away. In general, it is therefore advised to choose teams of four or fi ve students, and also to let students sign a deed of commitment at the beginning of the clinic course.

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2.2.3 Ethics and Professional Responsibility

Law clinics are an opportunity for students to act as legal professionals. Although law stu-dents usually take courses on ethics during their regular curriculum in law school, nothing puts these abstract notions into context like actual practical experience. During the partici-pation in a law clinic, students have the responsibility of working with real clients, during which they could be confronted with issues of professional responsibility and ethics. Stu-dents have to work according to deadlines, take responsibility for their work and be sensible towards both their team members and clients. They know that if they do not deliver their contribution to the project, the other team members might have to cover for them, or in the worst case scenario, the IHL Clinic Director has to explain to the client that a report could not be delivered (something which luckily so far has not happened at the Leiden or Bochum IHL Clinics, although several times there was no other possibility than asking for a resched-uling of the ﬁ nal deadline).

Additionally, students usually sign confi dentially agreements and may encounter confi -dential information, especially if the client is engaged in high profi le litigation cases. Some academic colleagues might be afraid that something like this should not be left to Bachelor or Master students to conduct research on. However, after six years of coordinating more than thirty projects in the area of international humanitarian law, international criminal law and human rights law, the fi rst author’s experience is that students are very well capable of dealing with this kind of highly sensitive information. On the contrary, we could even ob-serve that the realisation of how important and confi dential the respective project was, gave the students a heightened sense of responsibility which led to an extreme level of profession-alism. Law clinics thus are a very eff ective tool to make students familiar with professional values.

2.2.4 Societal Impact – and Students Seeing the Worth of it

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has been raised in a mentality of consumerism,22_{where they also see the success at}

univer-sity as an obligation which rest upon the educational institution, participation in a law clinic can show a young person how much you can achieve when you work hard and together for a common goal.

All in all, (international humanitarian) law clinics allow students to put law into practice, encourage them to take initiative, eloquently present their ﬁ ndings and take responsibility for their work. Clinical legal education puts abstract notions taught in law school into per-spective. In a nutshell, a law clinic provides law students with the values and skills neces-sary to know what the practice of (international humanitarian) law entails and, ultimately, enter the practice of law.

3 The Leiden IHL Clinic: The Challenge of Setting up a Law Clinic when Few People Know the Concept

The starting point for creating a conducive environment for the creation of the ﬁ rst Euro-pean IHL Clinic23_{was the establishment of the Kalshoven-Gieskes Forum on International}

Humanitarian Law (KGF) 24_{as a platform within the Grotius Centre of International Legal}

Studies25_{at Leiden University for the research, teaching and further dissemination of IHL.}

Shortly after the establishment of the KGF in 2011, the idea came up to use the expertise of the KGF’s members in order to develop a teaching method which included both theoretical training as well as the practical application of IHL to concrete cases.

In 2012, the KGF’s ﬁ rst six clinic teams started research projects at the request of three diﬀ erent cooperation partners (the Netherlands Red Cross, the German Red Cross and the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights). Since then, the Clinic has steadi-ly garnered popularity among both students and clients.26_{During this time, the Leiden IHL}

Clinic became the key component of the KGF. By now, every semester, it allows students to participate in extensive legal research projects, given to them by cooperation partners from the humanitarian ﬁ eld. After six years in operation, the Clinic has completed more than 30 research projects, and many students who participated in the Clinic have indicated that their experience was invaluable with regard to their skill development, seeing IHL in action and making a contribution in the ﬁ eld of IHL.27_{Furthermore, the establishment and operation}

of the Leiden IHL Clinic has stimulated the creation of new IHL Clinics at Roma Tre Uni-versity in Italy and at the IFHV of Ruhr UniUni-versity Bochum in Germany. In addition, guest

22 Cf. K. K. Myers / K. Sadaghiani, Millennials in the Workplace: A Communication Perspective on Millennials’ Organizational Relationships and Performance, in: Journal of Business and Psychology 25 (2) (2010), p. 225. Available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2868990/.

23 The ﬁ rst American and also worldwide IHL Clinic had been established in 2007 by Prof. Laurie Blank at Emo-ry Law School in Atlanta, please see http://law.emoEmo-ry.edu/academics/clinics/international-humanitarian-law- clinic.html; and her article on clinical legal education L. R. Blank / D. Kaye, supra note 17.

24 See the KGF’s website for more details on its mission and vision at www.kalshovengieskesforum.com. 25 For more information about the Grotius Centre, see its website at https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/law/ins

titute-of-public-law/grotius-centre.

26 See the KGF’s website at http://kalshovengieskesforum.com/ihl-clinic/.

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researchers and guest professors regularly spend time at the KGF in order to see how the Leiden IHL Clinic works in practice and how it might be transferred to other environments.

While the Leiden IHL Clinic is by now an established part of Leiden Law School, the initial years were not always as smooth as the current success might indicate. While the Gro-tius Centre had secured external funding for the setting up of the Forum and the position of the Director of the Forum, there was originally no budget to oﬀ er an IHL clinic. In this re-gard, the ﬁ rst author of this article decided to rely mainly on the pro bono help of his LL.M. alumni who had stayed in Leiden or The Hague and were interested in supervising ongoing projects parallel to their main job at one of the international institutions in The Hague.28

These freshly graduated international lawyers were assisted in the direct supervision of their clinic teams by more experienced PhD students or Assistant Professors of the Public Interna-tional Law department. For both alumni and senior colleagues this meant a certain addiInterna-tional workload besides their normal job description, which everyone seemed to be willing to take on. All people involved became part of a greater community and could not only develop their own skill set further, but were also able to have impact beyond their immediate aca-demic environment.

Only in the third year of its existence, the Director of the Leiden IHL Clinic established a system of ‘guest researchers’. These guest researchers were usually freshly graduated LL.M. students but later also more experienced colleagues, who would stay four to six months at the KGF in order to engage full-time in the supervision of the clinic teams. During that time, they also had the chance to use the facilities of Leiden Law School and the Grotius Centre to further develop their own research. This system enabled the Leiden IHL Clinic to oﬀ er pro-jects to the LL.B. and LL.M. programmes not only once a year in the winter semester, but also during the summer term. In addition, more projects could be oﬀ ered every semester and the number of IHL Clinic students rose up to 24 students per term.

It is probably interesting for academic colleagues who are contemplating to off er an IHL clinic to their students, that both Directors of the two IHL Clinics in Leiden and Roma Tre were doing this work – at least in the beginning – in addition to their normal teaching allo-cation. Only after three years of its existence the Leiden IHL Clinic managed to be included in the offi cial curriculum of its regular LL.M. programme in Public International Law (be-fore this, students could take part in the Clinic as an extra-curricular activity). And after fi ve years in operation, the KGF was able to get partly external funding for positions related to the supervision of its IHL Clinic, including a PhD Fellow and Teaching Assistant. Circum-stances which defi nitely supported the acquisition of additional funding for this programme of clinical legal education, was the establishment of an international cooperation with its sis-ter IHL Clinics at Emory Law School,29_{IDC Herzliya}30_{and later Roma Tre.}31_{What started}

oﬀ as a bold idea of three IHL Clinic Directors who wanted to enable the Clinics’ students to engage in an international cooperation spanning three continents, turned into reality when an 28 For a list of these former pro bono researchers, please see http://kalshovengieskesforum.com/staﬀ partners/. 29 See Emory Law website, ‘International Humanitarian Law Clinic’ at http://law.emory.edu/academics/clinics/

international-humanitarian-law-clinic.html.

30 See IDC Herzliya website, ‘The International Criminal and Humanitarian Law Clinic’ at https://www.idc.ac.il/ en/schools/law/clinics/pages/the-international-criminal-and-humanitarian-law-clinic.aspx.

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international donor agreed to fund a three-year exchange programme between the IHL Clin-ics in Atlanta, Herzliya and Leiden.32_{This ﬁ nancial support for the clinic cooperation was}

later renewed for another two years, also including the newly founded IHL Clinic at Roma Tre.

3.1 The Cooperation Partners

The mission of the KGF is to promote and strengthen respect for IHL and its implementa-tion in naimplementa-tional law, in order to create better protecimplementa-tion and assistance for victims of war and more respect for humanity in armed confl icts and crises situations. This is why the Clinic supports initiatives that help to promote, disseminate and enforce IHL as well as increase ac-countability for perpetrators of IHL violations. Therefore, instead of off ering legal services to individuals, the Clinic is more likely to cooperate with international and humanitarian actors, including NGOs and international organisations, that often lack the capacity and in-frastructure to conduct thorough and in-depth research themselves. Current and former part-ners of the Clinic include the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and several national Red Cross societies, which respond to humanitarian crises and promote respect for IHL; Médecins Sans Frontières, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which is an organisation that initiates and develops strategic human rights litigation, Amnes-ty International, and the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, a civil socieAmnes-ty part-nership advocating for international cooperation with(in) the International Criminal Court and universal justice for victims of international crimes. A special example is the unique co-operation between the Law and Policy Department of the ICRC, the Leiden IHL Clinic and its three sister IHL Clinics, in which teams from all four IHL Clinics undertake research on examples of compliance with IHL in past or current confl ict zones.33

3.2 The Projects

Every academic year, there are two cycles of Clinic projects, one in the winter and one in the spring semester. The Clinic is off ered to Leiden Law School students from three diff erent programmes: the Regular LL.M. in Public International Law, the Advanced LL.M in Public International Law, and the faculty’s Honours College LL.B. programme. Students are se-lected on the basis of their motivation, grades and experience. After a round of interviews, a fi nal team selection is made. As IHL is not a large part of the regular curriculum, Clinic students follow a series of lectures on the fundamentals of IHL, other areas of law related to the work of the Clinic and on the interaction between these fi elds of law at the beginning of every project cycle. This allows students to develop their knowledge regarding the existing legal framework of IHL and its basic principles, international human rights law and

inter-32 Cf. https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2015/12/leiden-ihl-clinic-participates-in-1st-ihl-clinic-internatio nal-exchange-programme-conference-in-israel; http://law.emory.edu/news-center/releases/2016/05/ihl-clinic-shines-brighter-for-ﬁ nding-two-mates.html#.W9nQjWhKiUk and https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/ 2017/01/international-humanitarian-law-clinic-exchange-conference-2016.

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national criminal law. In addition, as a lot of students are usually inexperienced in writing a more elaborate legal report, the Clinic oﬀ ers a ‘skills class’ on academic writing.

Over the course of four months, teams of three to fi ve students conduct research in co-operation with the Clinic’s coco-operation partners. The selected Honours College students of-ten form a separate team; LL.M. students from the regular and advanced programmes will conduct research in mixed teams. Cooperation with the Clinic’s partners may take diff erent forms, but projects mostly consist of conducting research in order to answer a concrete le-gal question posed by the cooperation partner, resulting in an elaborate research report. The Clinic Director is in charge of the KGF and the overall coordination of the Clinic. He is the one to be in fi rst contact with the cooperation partner. Together, they discuss possible assign-ments within the partner’s and the Clinic’s fi eld of work. The assignassign-ments usually focus on the legal research of either a specifi c incident or confl ict zone or on complex contemporary issues in the fi eld of IHL, humanitarian assistance, international human rights law or inter-national criminal law (or a mix of these fi elds). In the past, research has focused on many diff erent topics, including alleged war crimes in specifi c confl ict situations, new means and methods of warfare (e. g. cyber warfare, drones and lethal autonomous weapon systems), the application of IHL to certain confl ict situations and providing support to eff orts to update a national military manual.34

At the beginning of a project, the students will meet with the cooperation partner, dis-cuss the assignment and ask questions with regard to the partner’s expectations and the legal question posed. Throughout the project, the partner will be updated on the project’s prog-ress and, if necessary, the partner may give feedback. In addition, the Clinic has a layered system of control and supervision internally, in order to ensure the quality of every report.35

Although the Clinic Director engages in the overall project organisation and general issues arising during the Clinic, each project is supervised by a senior supervisor (usually an Asso-ciate Professor or Assistant Professor) as well as by at least one direct project supervisor (a PhD Fellow or guest researcher). The direct project supervisor keeps in close contact with the students during the project and coordinates with the senior supervisor. Supervisors in the Clinic come from diﬀ erent universities and often have practical experience, academic expe-rience, or both. This way, the group of supervisors in the Clinic represent diﬀ erent views and perspectives on the issues covered by the projects.

A series of usually ﬁ ve substantive introductory lectures are complemented by at least three to four “common seminar sessions” where teams have to present their work, including the key legal issues presented by the assignment, preliminary results and challenges to the other teams and their supervisors. In addition, the teams have regular (weekly or biweekly) meetings with their direct project supervisor, who provides the students with feedback on their work. During the project, the teams must work as independently as possible. Depend-ing on the type of the project and question, the students should distribute the work amongst themselves and peer review everything they write before handing in their work for feedback from their supervisor. Sometimes, teams get the opportunity to participate in ﬁ eld trips con-34 For a detailed list of concluded projects by the KGF’s IHL Clinic, please see http://kalshovengieskesforum.com/

ihl-clinic/.

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nected to the projects they are working on, which gives them more insight into the practical work of the cooperation partners and the complexity of the issue at hand. At the end of the project, teams will hand in a report which counts towards 80 % of their grade. In addition, every team has to present its ﬁ ndings to the other teams, supervisors and the cooperation partners.36_{Upon successful completion of a clinic project, students receive academic credit}

for their work.37_{After the ﬁ nal grading, every team will have a collective evaluation session}

with its supervisors, in which students can reﬂ ect on their individual work but also on their work as a team.

3.3 The Leiden IHL Clinic as a Basis for an Almost Complete Professional and Academic Training Programme

The KGF’s IHL Clinic was established with the aim of providing assistance to clients in the humanitarian fi eld, while giving students the chance to see IHL in practice and improve both their knowledge of IHL and professional legal skills. Although the Clinic clearly rests on the same pillars as more traditional legal clinics, the IHL Clinic off ers (at least) two additional benefi ts. First, as IHL basically deals with battlefi eld situations, it can be an even more ab-stract fi eld of law than for example criminal law, since the Clinic will usually operate not directly in an armed confl ict situation. In the Clinic, students get to interact with (legal) offi cers in the humanitarian fi eld and see IHL in action in more ways than they might have previously imagined. Second, by off ering a law clinic in the fi eld of IHL, students not only gain important legal skills in general, but also advanced knowledge of IHL and other skills essential to its dissemination and promotion.38_{The KGF’s Clinic thus is an eff ective fi rst step}

in training the IHL lawyers of the future.

However, the Forum’s Clinic does not end at skill development and providing legal as-sistance to cooperation partners. The Clinic also is a great opportunity for students aspiring to work in the fi eld of international (humanitarian) law to get in contact with humanitarian actors and, possibly, future employers. During the Clinic, students often are invited to visit the cooperation partner’s headquarters or attend events organised by the cooperation partner. In addition, as previously discussed, the Leiden IHL Clinic has three partner Clinics in the fi eld of IHL. Every year, the four IHL Clinics alternately organise an IHL Clinic Exchange Conference, during which the teams from the Clinics can meet, ultimately creating a net-work of future international lawyers. During the conference, students meet both academics and practitioners from the fi eld and visit international institutions, also adding to their net-work. As a result, students who participate in the KGF’s IHL Clinic can start developing their network in the fi eld. After a Clinic project ends, students can join the KGF’s alumni network to become part of the Clinic community and stay in touch.

36 Counting for 20 % of their grade.

37 Upon the successful fulﬁ lment of the Clinic, Honours College students receive 10 ECTS for their Honours College curriculum; regular LL.M. students receive 5 ECTS.

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Furthermore, and unlike most law clinics, a student’s participation in the KGF does not have to end with a Clinic project. Besides running the Clinic, the KGF engages in IHL re-search, training and dissemination. The KGF has its own research group, hosts trainings in IHL at several international organisations and institutions and organises public dissemina-tion events.39_{Within this framework, the KGF aims to educate the next generation of IHL}

lawyers. Under the guidance of highly qualifi ed academics, law students and future IHL lawyers as well as researchers get the chance to grow within the KGF. Highly motivated and capable students may become a student assistant, supporting its staff in day-to-day activities, the organisation of dissemination events and the coordination of the Clinic. A student assis-tant could go on to coordinate and supervise a clinic project, become a guest researcher and/ or, eventually, be a PhD Fellow at the KGF; all under high-quality academic guidance of the KGF’s varied and accomplished staff .40_{This shows that the KGF off ers diff erent levels}

of legal training; the IHL Clinic is only one of them. All these aspects of legal training work towards the promotion and enforcement of IHL.

4 The Bochum IHL Clinic: Setting up a Law Clinic in the Traditional System of German Legal Education

After six years of directing the Leiden IHL Clinic, the ﬁ rst author was oﬀ ered the opportuni-ty to set up a second IHL Clinic41_{at the Bochum Institute for International Law of Peace and}

Armed Conﬂ ict (IFHV)42_{in Germany. This presented the chance to integrate an innovative}

approach of teaching IHL into a system of legal education which is probably one of the most traditional and conservative ones in Europe. Since German legal education is still governed by the fact that a big part of the examination of law students is under the responsibility of the federal state, there usually is not much room for introducing a method of teaching which at fi rst glance does not directly fi t into the curriculum of the First or Second Legal State Examination (which mainly aims at educating law students to become lawyers, prosecutors and judges in the national context). Luckily, the IFHV is not only one of the prime institu-tions for the teaching and research of IHL in Europe, it also has always been very open to-wards new developments and pursues a very international approach toto-wards the teaching of international law. In this regard, it was decided to fi rst off er the Bochum IHL Clinic to the students of the interdisciplinary Master‘s Degree Programme in International Humanitarian Action (NOHA).43_{Selected German law students were off ered the opportunity to}

comple-ment these Bochum IHL Clinic teams.44

The setup of the Bochum IHL Clinic, which fi rst started to work on three diff erent proj-ects in Spring 2018, showed again that it is very helpful if the organiser of a clinical pro-gramme brings along some fl exibility. In contrast to the Leiden IHL Clinic, where students spend three to four months on each project concurrently to their regular coursework, the 39 For more details, see the KGF’s website at http://kalshovengieskesforum.com/ihl-dissemination/.

40 See for a list of the current KGF staﬀ members: http://kalshovengieskesforum.com/staﬀ partners/. 41 For more details, please refer to http://www.ifhv.de/index.php/teaching/bochum-ihl-clinic. 42 For more information, please see the website of the IFHV at http://www.ifhv.de.

43 For more information, see IFHV website ‘NOHA Master’ at http://www.ifhv.de/index.php/noha-master. 44 See for more details the IFHV website on the IHL Clinic at

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Bochum IHL Clinic took place in a more concentrated form over a period of six weeks. This obviously raised some additional challenges. There was less time for the students to get ac-quainted with the general problem of the Clinic assignment and the supervisors of the proj-ect were under time pressure to give feedback on the incoming drafts from the students. One solution to this problem was obvious: the assignments had to be reduced in scope. In addi-tion, the size of the student teams was increased to six students per team which in general raised the concern whether all students would equally be able to contribute to the team work. As teachers all over the world know, there is a tendency for students to feel not as much re-sponsibility towards a group project once they see that there is a suﬃ cient number of other students taking on the required task.

Overall, the group work in the fi rst semester of the Bochum IHL Clinic showed that also putting together teams of six students with quite diverse backgrounds can work. All three teams produced impressive fi nal reports. However, it indeed turned out that during the Clin-ic, one or two students seemed to have not completely contributed in the same way as their peers. But even this problematic situation proved the value of clinic legal education. On the one hand, it required the other team members to deal with the new challenge and partly dis-tribute the tasks among themselves. On the other hand, when at one point the hesitant con-tribution of two students became too obvious, the team as such approached the supervisor in order to discuss the situation and ask for advice on how to solve this dilemma. The inter-esting aspect was that some of the team members were concerned that a third student who was working especially hard (and who was not among the students approaching the Clinic Director), would not get the desired grade because of the more ‘reluctant’ team member. This showed an amazing side eff ect of working together on clinic projects: students started to care for each other and not only for themselves.

Another special aspect of the Bochum IHL Clinic in its ﬁ rst semester of operation was that not all the participating students were law students. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the NOHA master’s in international humanitarian action,45_{some of the students had}

back-grounds in economics, management, medicine or history. This required the ﬁ rst author to set up an additional level of introductory lectures which included sources of (international) law, legal argumentation and legal writing. In comparison to the Leiden IHL Clinic, where the clinic projects are accompanied by a three-month programme of substantive IHL and international criminal law lectures as well as common seminar sessions, the accompanying course at the IFHV had to be dealt within a period of three weeks.

Despite these numerous challenges which the Bochum IHL Clinic had to face during its ﬁ rst semester of inception, it nevertheless turned out to become one of the most popular courses within the NOHA master’s programme and received very positive student evalua-tions. The one aspect which was criticised was the short timeframe available to the students to work on the projects, and that students would have appreciated to have more time to con-duct their research. This concern has immediately been taken into account in the new cycle of IHL Clinic projects in the winter term of 2018. Now, the Bochum IHL Clinic also runs over a period of four months, parallel to the coursework of both NOHA master’s students and German Law students. Similar to Leiden Law School, the organisers in Bochum were

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surprised by how many interested and motivated students applied for the Clinic despite its considerable workload.

5 Conclusion: Six Years of Clinical Legal Education in the Field of IHL: A Short Reﬂ ection

What started as a pioneer project at the oldest law faculty in the Netherlands and one of the most world-renowned centres for international law has become by now a worldwide trend in teaching international (humanitarian) law. IHL Clinics have proven to be of crucial value for the successful dissemination of IHL and the training of a new generation of international humanitarians. Bridging the gap between academia and practice while building the struc-ture of our IHL Clinics on teaching concepts that had been known from Anglo-American clinical legal education as well as the already established concepts of using moot courts for the application of theoretical knowledge to (ﬁ ctitious) practical cases, led to a movement of like-minded colleagues all over the world who have realised that clinical legal education can be of extreme beneﬁ t for the training and dissemination of IHL. Whereas the current in-ternational cooperation of IHL Clinics consists at the moment of four Clinics located in the Netherlands, the United States, Israel and Italy, new IHL and international criminal law clin-ics have already been established or are about to be established in Argentina, Burkina Faso, Canada, France, Germany, Kenya, Scotland, Switzerland and the Middle-East.