Helping Prisoners, Juveniles, Children and Others: The Growth and Sustainability of CLE in Malaysia
With students teaching in prisons, community centers, juvenile detention facilities and often providing legal teachings to their own peers on campus, CLE has flourished in 2009 throughout Malaysia. BABSEA CLE has been a supporting partner throughout, in part by hosting and providing fee waiver scholarships for four Community Outreach Programme/Clinical Legal Education University Malaya (UM) students to participate in the BABSEA CLE International Legal Studies Internship Program during July 2009. These students, alongside BABSEA CLE Malaysian NGO partner ERA Consumer, were given the task of developing a community legal education child rights manual.
During this same period, representatives of the UM CLE program, with the support of BABSEA CLE, attended the 10th Australian Legal Education Conference in Perth, Australia. The Malaysian CLE movement also spread to Southern Thailand (Hat Yai) where UM began directly assisting Prince Songkla University (PSU), in the development of a community legal education program. BABSEA CLE was also brought in as a co-facilitating partner in this endeavor and both BABSEA CLE and UM look forward to 2010 where they will be further assisting PSU to implement CLE. CLE work continued through the end of the year as four members of the UM CLE program accompanied BABSEA CLE representatives to three CLE workshops in Vietnam in December, 2009. The four Malaysian students shared experiences and ideas with their Vietnamese counterparts, as well as three CLE representatives from Laos, serving as a remarkable example of the ever-growing regional CLE network’s capacity. 2010 plans to be an even more exciting year as much broader CLE outreach is intended to occur throughout Malaysia, with a national CLE conference tentatively scheduled for Fall.