New Students Oriented Into The Clinical Legal Education Program For 2019/2020
Thirty students that successfully went through a rigorous recruitment exercise have been inducted into the Clinical Legal Education program at a meeting held at the School of Law Board room this afternoon, Monday 20th January 2020.
In his remarks, the Ag. Principal School of Law and Coordinator Public Interest Law Clinic Dr. Christopher Mbazira said the law is as dishonest as the law professors and students. ‘Before one joins legal education, there is a feeling that the law is just which turns out to be a fantasy’ he said.
He said although Law Schools are in principal aimed at promoting justice and a lot of other good things, the reality was that lawyers promote capital and other interests hence depriving justice to a big proportion of the population of Uganda and therefore making them even more vulnerable.
He attributed this partly to the design of legal education which was made to serve the interests of the affluent. He said by the time of graduation, students do not attend to the interests of the poor and vulnerable as they eventually take on the flashy ways of the profession characterized by sleek cars and expensive jackets. He said many of the law students and those in practice were in reality from humble, peasant like backgrounds that make the vast majority of the population.
Dr. Mbazira said it was because of this that he together with some of his colleagues decided to take an initiative in addressing the training of lawyers to inculcate into them values in order to be more responsive to the needs of the majority. He said this is what led to the PILAC program that aims at promotion of social justice issues and human Rights
He said the program that started in 2012 with 12 students was steadily growing and networking with the alumni and other law teaching Universities in Uganda and the region.