From the February 2010 issue of Our Moment, the UConn Foundation's e-newsletter. Reprinted with permission from the fall 2009 University of Connecticut School of Law Graduate Report.
Rachel Sauer ’10 recently returned from spending the first semester of her final year at the School of Law studying in Aix-en-Provence, where, in addition to learning about economics and civil law, she polished her French.
“I think it is really important to understand legal French because French is spoken all over Africa and at the United Nations,” Sauer says. “Being proficient would make me better able to work on international human rights issues, which I plan to do after law school.”
Sauer’s semester in France is just one leg in what has been a very busy academic career. During the summer after her first year, for example, Sauer interned at the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School, where she worked on domestic violence issues. That was followed this past summer by an internship with the State Department, which was made possible through a Public Interest Law Group (PILG) grant. Each fall for the past 16 years, an auction is held to raise funds to support the PILG endowment. The endowment funds summer grants for students working in the public interest. At the State Department, Sauer worked in the Bureau of International Organizations, Human Rights, Humanitarian, and Social Affairs focusing on humanitarian aid and human rights policy with the United Nations.
Last spring, Sauer enrolled in the school’s Human Rights and International Law Clinic where she worked on a case addressing the role of victims before the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
“As a part of the clinic, a classmate and I traveled with our professor to Phnom Penh to witness the tribunals and to learn more about how Cambodian refugees in the U.S. could get involved,” she says. “Our project was designed to bring back information to our clients—a group of refugees who had settled in Lowell, Massachusetts. The goal was to educate them about the tribunals, help people educate their children and future generations about the Khmer Rouge genocide, help people get involved as civil parties if they wanted to, and find alternative channels for people to testify about their experiences.”
Travel and other expenses for the trip were paid in part by gifts to the Law School Foundation’s Annual Fund.
Sauer’s visit to Cambodia elicited a mix of emotions. Exciting, sad, thrilling, scary, beautiful, hideous, historic, and eye-opening are just some of the words she uses to describe her experience. “The current legal regime was basically built from scratch after an estimated 2 million people died in a genocide that lasted from 1975 to 1979,” she says. “The Khmer Rouge killed virtually every intellectual, concentrating on people living in cities, people with an education, even people who wore glasses…Visiting Tuol Sleng, a prison camp where an estimated 17,000 people were tortured, was probably the scariest thing that I have ever done.”
According to Sauer, seeing the Cambodian tribunals first hand and speaking with survivors reinforced why she came to law school in the first place: “To help people and make a difference.”
Sauer hopes to return to Cambodia before long. “I am now preparing a Fulbright application to go back and research the influence of the rule of law on sex trafficking, a major problem in Cambodia, especially among children.” she says. And after that? “I hope to go back to the State Department and work in international human rights.”
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