Four Boyd Students Bridging Borders this Summer in Southeast Asia (part two)

Four Boyd School of Law students were among 43 students from 38 law schools who were accepted into the Bridges Across Borders Southeast Asia 2009 summer legal internship program (BABSEA). Aaron MacDonald ’11 worked in Laos, Jeff Haywood ’10 in Thailand, and Heidi Hauck ’11 and Rebecca Blood ’10 in Cambodia. Since 2004, BABSEA legal interns have been aiding the struggle to ameliorate the hardships and legal inequities in Southeast Asia.

(This is part two of a three-part series of stories. The first part featured Heidi Hauck and Rebecca Blood and can be read here. The third part highlights Jeff Haywood.)

Aaron MacDonald ’11

Aaron devoted most of his time to three important and beneficial activities. He contributed to the development of a lawyer training lesson for a post-graduate internship training program required of Laotian lawyers seeking bar admission. He also developed a legal resource handbook for use by Laotian lawyers in the Lao Bar Association’s legal aid clinics. Third, he taught legal English to members of the bar and to students and teachers at the National University Laos Faculty of Law.

Discovering what he termed “glaring human rights violations, like detention of citizens in Lao prison with no means of reprieve” was at first understandably a bit disheartening, but he also took some time to hike to temple Wat Phrathat at the top of Mount Doi Suthep with the BABSEA family.

One of his first experiences was exposure to the Lao Bar Association’s first phase of an Access to Justice Survey. Conducted as a partnership between the quasi-governmental organization of the Lao Bar with the Lao Ministry of Justice and sponsored by the United Nations Development Project, the survey was being designed to assess the need for learning how to access the legal field.

Although in the planning stages since 2006, the survey, he said, “was glaringly necessary in various areas of the country.”

Students enjoy the English Discussions at the Laos National University of Law and Political Science. Aaron at left.