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Baçhçeşehir University’s 6th Moot Court Competition

Young Human Rights Defenders Prepare for their Career
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 Young Human Rights Defenders Prepare for their Career: The Baçhçeşehir University’s 6th Moot Court Competition

Imagine for a while you were a human rights lawyer in Turkey. Your client, let us call her Maryam Nasrin Jabbari, seeks your help because she has fled political oppression in Iran and fled to Turkey with her five year-old son. The Turkish authorities deported her back to Iran where she was tortured. Now, it is your task to defend her and file an individual application in her name at the Turkish Constitutional Court so that she may return to Turkey legally. 

18 students from four different Turkish universities were tasked to master this case in the final round of the 6th edition of Bahçeşehir University’s Moot Individual Application Competition. The case is fictional, of course, yet the competition was real. The participants from Uludağ, Koç, Ankara and Trabzon Universities were given one month to prepare an application for the Constitutional Court to address the human rights and freedom violations in the hypothetical case.

On May 22, all law teams presented their cases – prepared in one month of hard work. The jury was made up of the attorneys Ayşe Dicle Ergin and Abdülhalim Yılmaz as well as Constitutional Court rapporteur Mustafa İlhan Öztürk. Due to the Corona crisis, the final could not be held live at Bahçeşehir University. Once more, Zoom served as a  great alternative to organize and also broadcast the competition.

The participants said thy gained a lot of new knowledge on human rights law. What’s more, they could practice a human rights case and so prepare in a practical way for their future career as lawyers. The jurors too were happy: They said the project supports and encourages law students to work and do research on human rights law.

The team of Uludağ University’s Law Faculty won the competition and will soon be able to discover one of the most important places for the defense of human rights: The lucky members of the winning team are invited to visit the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.