Alternative Careers in Law
Reflecting on life as a Human Rights Lawyer Vicki Prais
I
am standing in the middle of Gracanica, a Serb enclave in Kosovo, amidst bombed out homes pockmarked from afar by Albanian snipers. It is 2004 and as a Minority Rights Officer with the United Nations, I am here to celebrate a wine harvest with the local community. I speak to members of the Serb community who tell me about their lives here with no electricity, restricted freedom of movement and UN escorts to and from their place of work. This is one of my most enduring memories in my career as an international human rights lawyer and was a formative moment in my own career journey.
and migrants before the immigration courts in London. It was the best training I could have had and gave me a strong set of skills which we need as human rights lawyers. The key skills are forensic analysis, advocacy, negotiation, empathy, legal drafting, and working with marginalised groups. It was deeply affecting work. I still think about many of my cases to this day. My time at the IAS was also hugely formative in developing my thematic expertise - working on behalf of people deprived of liberty, prisoners’ rights, prison reform and dignity behind bars. This forms the backbone of my consultancy practice today.
My international practice as a I knew from my early days as a law human rights lawyer has taken me ‘London is home, but the world is my student that a career in human rights around the world to many countries, workplace’. was where my heart lay. The shiny including Bangladesh, Russia, corporate world of the suited and Ukraine, Japan, Armenia, Georgia, booted was not for me. I knew the Ethiopia and Canada to name but ‘what’ but had to figure out the ‘how’. I a few. I like to say that ‘London is decided to study law and graduated with a master’s degree in home but the world is my workplace’. I have been privileged Human Rights and Civil Liberties before qualifying as a solicitor. I to work in many sectors of the human rights world including hoped that as a lawyer, I could be a ‘change-maker’. international organisations (the Council of Europe, the UN), the non-governmental sector (Amnesty International, Penal Reform I cut my teeth as an immigration and asylum lawyer working for International), the British Government (Human Rights Advisor six and a half years for a large national charity, the Immigration to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and Advisory Service (IAS). The charity represents asylum seekers academia (as a Visiting Professor of Human Rights)
Vicki Prais in Kosovo 26 | LegalWomen
