RESTRUCTURING OUR KEY AREA
SAMIRA SAFAROVA
Vice President in charge of Academic Activities
One of the Strategic Goals that the International Council decided to go forward with during the ICM Baku was to ensure the sustainability of our Association by means of an effective division of workload among the Members of the International Board. With that goal in mind, this year, our primary purpose was to reconsider the amount of work that each project manager has been taking on a daily basis and the objectives of every project, ensuring that all of the key areas are aligned with the purpose of the Association. This led us to develop the structure of our key areas in a way that would allow us to maintain the attention for legal education and social responsibility.
attention to the advancement of professional development projects such as Career Launch. In this way, we have been training our members to pursue the career paths they envision. Lastly, we started developing a new target within the Academic Activities Area, Social Responsibility, the second pillar of our philosophy statement. This target included the plan that legal publications such as the ELSA Law Review and Legal Research Groups would accompany the Rule of Law Education Campaign and the Annual Human Rights Campaign. With these additions, we were able to make the International Board work more effectively with a coherent division of projects and purpose under each area. This also allowed for the development of each respective area and the growth of the impact of ELSA’s activities. If we look into the current distribution within the International Board of ELSA: i) in the Professional Development area, we have developed Career Launch in order to introduce our members to potential educational and job providers; ii) on the Competitions side, we focused on aligning the structure of both Moot Court Competitions and supporting the Network in the development of this new area and their own projects; iii) regarding Seminars and Conferences, we focused on separating academic content from what falls under advocacy, thus orienting the International Focus Programme to legal education, and the Annual Human Rights Campaign to advocacy; iv) lastly, regarding Academic Activities we focussed on the growth of the impact of ELSA on civil society by finally launching the first edition of ROLE and creating new initiatives such as the Mental Health project to ensure that ELSA has a primordial role in shaping the world of the future.
Starting with the first of these priorities, we ensured that our key areas developed a good basis for legal education by allowing S&C to acquire knowledge, especially now that our events are returning to the physical format. We have also been using the opportunity to involve the Vice President in charge of Moot Court Competitions in the organisation of all Competitions at the international level; mainly the John H. Jackson and Helga Pedersen Moot Court Competitions, but also in the development stage of other Academic Competitions such as ENC, WIC, CIC, Legal Debates, right before the new Board structure with the implementation of the Vice President in charge of Competition position enters into force. Preparing the transition period between these positions helped us draw the line between active and passive learning, which our Network has relied on while establishing its projects. As a third branch of the Legal Education Goal, we completed the transition of the former STEP Area into Professional Development by paying particular
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ANNUAL REPORT
