NLSIU conducted a clinical workshop on Human Rights Lawyering over a six-month period from November 2023- April 2024 with the participation of 26 BA LLB (Hons) and LLM students of NLSIU. The Clinical Workshop offered an orientation to goals and methods of human right lawyering, and applied these tools towards active public interventions in a contemporary human rights concern. The Clinical Workshop proceeded along two inter-connected segments:
(A) Perspectives and case studies of human rights lawyering (‘Methods’), and
(B) Interventions in an ongoing issue through research, documentation and advocacy (‘Interventions’).
In this iteration, students undertook documentation, research and advocacy relating to the environmental and human rights impact of the proposed Sijimali bauxite mine in Rayagada and Kalahandi districts of Odisha. As part of this, students scrutinized volumes of primary project documents and reports of executive proceedings as part of the ongoing environmental and forest clearance processes of the proposed project, studied international and domestic environmental and human rights laws and standards applicable to the project, along side secondary research relating to the environmental and human rights impact of bauxite mines at other sites across the world.
The findings of this documentation and research exercise have been reported in Under the Surface: Environmental and Human Rights Impact of Proposed Sijimali Bauxite Mine (2024) co-authored by the students and instructor at the Clinic.
About the instructor:
Radhika Chitkara is presently Assistant Professor (Law) and the Dr. NR Madhav Menon Doctoral Scholar at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, where she also runs the Clinical Workshop on Human Rights Lawyering. She obtained her LLM from Harvard Law School with a Concentration in International Human Rights in 2017, and B.A., LL.B.(Hons.) from NLSIU in 2013. She is currently pursuing her PhD on “Policing Terror: Institutions Behind and Beyond Extraordinary Norms”, focusing on the counter-terror policing infrastructure of the State including, but extending beyond, anti-terror laws such as the UAPA.
For over a decade now, Radhika’s work has been embedded within the civil liberties, women’s, and land rights movements in northern and eastern India. As a human rights practitioner, she has undertaken primary and doctrinal research, investigations into rights violations, documentation, advocacy, direct legal representation, legal literacy, and other diverse interventions, individually and as part of civil society collectives and NGOs.
She teaches substantive and adjectival criminal law, and human rights lawyering at NLSIU. Previously, she has taught constitutional law, legal methods and feminist legal theories at the Jindal Global Law School and National Law University Delhi.