AI Youth Forum

AI Youth Forum

On 4 May 2021, ELSA will celebrate its 40th Anniversary, and naturally, the International Board of ELSA has been planning eagerly for this occasion. While this will obviously involve the gathering of ELSA members and alumni at a great party, we wanted to do more. When looking at the purpose of ELSA, it became clear to us that there is no greater way to celebrate ELSA than by empowering youth to create a just world. Therefore, we created the AI Youth Forum which will be carried out over the course of the ELSA term 2020/2021.

The Youth Forum aims at bringing together youth from all over Europe to discuss a just world can be created through AI. The project will last the entire coming term and is divided in three phases. Firstly, the participants will be educated on AI during the months leading to the Forum through a series of five webinars. During the Youth Forum itself, the participants will be divided into four working groups, namely gender, age, education and international relations. Through training sessions, buzz groups and drafting sessions, the participants will acquire the skills necessary to draft a policy paper and AI toolkit. The final phase consists of the follow-up; the policy paper will be made public and shared with the relevant public sector actors making decisions in the respective areas. Moreover, the AI tool-kit will be shared with the ELSA Network on national and local levels. The celebrations will predominantly take place during a Gala Ball for which the entire network, including active members and alumni, is invited.

STEP vacancies on Human Rights

In an effort to highlight the professional opportunities in the field of human rights and pro bono, in autumn 2019, ELSA introduced a new search engine feature for the Student Trainee Exchange Programme (STEP) for Traineeship Providers active in the field of human rights as well as the topic of the IFP. In total, ELSA offered nearly 40 STEP vacancies in the field of human rights (e.g. the Council of Europe, legal advice centres). For more information, please visit step. elsa.org.

Socially Responsible Brand

ELSA strives for building a socially responsible future generation of lawyers and law students, and builds its brand around the same values with strong dedication. Keeping this in mind, we as the International Board of ELSA made social responsibility one of the focus points in our One Year Operational Plan and started implementing these values in our everyday life as well as the ELSA Brand.

Acknowledging the fact that we affect not only the legal environment but society in general with the resources we have, we tried to utilise our external communication channels to give the right messages to our audience. One example of this was to promote our Human Rights Campaign that is called the International Focus Programme in order to educate the society on many matters related to the topic of Freedom of Expression Online.

Furthermore, the unprecedented times we had to go through due to COVID-19 was one of the prime examples of the above mentioned. Following the instructions given by the authorities and focusing on the factual information when communicating with our members through different means was very important and very valuable at the same time when it came to the perception of our brand from an external perspective.

Digital dimensions - the ELSA Law Review Blog

The ELSA Law Review was founded in 1989 and has undergone great developments in the latest year. Law reviews are extensively researched, rigorously edited and peer-reviewed publications which provide original contributions to academic legal conversations. However, as law review contributions are typically published close to a year after the author has started writing it, they have a limited capacity to provide immediate reactions to developing situations. In order to bring the law review into the digital era and allow for more live commentary, therefore, ELSA introduced an online blog. A blog gave the excellent opportunity for the ELSA Law Review to publish shorter, focused pieces of legal writing that provide reactions to current legal controversies.

Since its creation in February 2020, the ELSA Law Review Blog has published nine articles focussed primarily on current topics of human rights law. On the blog, the reader may find ELSA’s commentary to the use of surveillance and tracking systems in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the difficult human rights issues caused by such systems. Furthermore, ELSA revisited the precedence set by the European Court of Human Rights in S.A.S. v. France - a case analysing the legality of a French ban against facial concealment. The blog post questions the reasoning behind the case and the arguments of the respondent state in a time where such facial concealment bans still exist, but where the use of Personal Protective Equipment covering both face and nose is mandated by law.

The ELSA Law Review Blog hence functions as a great tool for ELSA to comment on topical and recent developments in society as advocates for change.