Participants in the Autumn Academy visiting DHL Multilateral
In partnership with the University of Lviv and financed by the German Federal Foreign Office, the IRZ invited 21 students and young professionals from seven countries to an Autumn Academy, which took place in Bonn from 27 October to 3 November 2018.
The students had to have an excellent knowledge of German, as well as a basic understanding of German law, to be allowed to take part in the academy. This meant that many of them had already taken part in the annual “IRZ Summer School on German Law” in Bonn.
During the seven-day course, the participants were able to attend more in-depth lectures on German law. Lawyers, judges, researchers and a professor gave lectures on the following topics:
EU law,
proceedings at the ECtHR,
private international law,
IT criminal law,
commercial and partnership law,
corporation law,
arbitration,
tax law,
the law on renewable energies and
insolvency law.
The participants were also given information on international association activities and a lawyer gave a report on his work as a long-term advisor to the IRZ as part of an EU technical assistance project. There were also visits to the German Federal Cartel Office and the DHL head offices in Bonn.
All the participants showed a great deal of interest and commitment. They asked a lot of questions during the discussions and at the end of the event, they took a final test in German.
One important element of this event was for participants to be able to network with one another right from the start, enabling them to maintain professional contact in future. This important objective has already been achieved, as indicated by a post on Facebook.
Participants in the eighth IRZ Summer School on German Law Multilateral
The IRZ has organised its eighth “Summer School on German Law”, which took place this year from 8 to 14 July in Bonn. Once again this year, eleven IRZ partner states were involved: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Russia, Serbia, Tunisia and Ukraine. Kazakhstan and Tunisia were represented for the first time.
As already reported, the Summer School, which was originally devised as an addition to the German-language supplementary study course on the introduction of German law at the Ivan Franko University of Lviv (Western Ukraine), brings together participants from numerous IRZ partner states and every year is in increasing demand. Participants must have a very good level of German.
This year’s Summer School began with lectures on the protection of fundamental rights, which deals with jurisdiction at the German Federal Constitutional Court and at the European Court of Human Rights, as well as with the European Convention on Human Rights. Other lectures were given on the following areas of the law:
civil law,
company law,
insolvency law,
arbitration,
European civil and commercial law,
criminal law and criminal procedural law and
law on lawyers.
Methodology was also discussed. As every year, the participants in the Summer School visited hearings at a civil and criminal division of the Regional Court of Bonn. They also attended discussions at the University of Bonn, so that they could find out about study opportunities for foreign students and postgraduates.
The Summer School is aimed mainly at students and new entrants to the legal profession.
Thanks to the large amount of positive feedback it has received, the IRZ plans to continue the good tradition of the IRZ Summer School over the years to come and thereby continue to support law students and graduates in IRZ partner states.
Veronika Keller-Engels (at the centre), IRZ General Director, and Mohamed Montasser Abidi (left), Head of Section for Northern Africa / Middle East, welcoming the particpants of the seminar
Based on the first positive experience from last year, the IRZ together with the German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection, organised a second seminar on the “introduction into German law” designed for Arabic-speaking refugees with a legal background in Bonn on 10 and 11 October 2017.
The objective of the follow-up event was to provide information for the Arabic-speaking refugees and facilitate their integration. To this end, the IRZ organised an introduction into German law and the fundamentals of the asylum system in Germany.
The invited group was made up of partly very experienced Syrian and Iraqi judges, lawyers, law professionals, civil servants and young law graduates.
The IRZ was supported by the experienced lecturers Uwe Stark, a judge at the local court of Siegen, Dr. Arnd Weishaupt, a presiding judge at the higher regional court of Düsseldorf, and Jens Dieckmann, a lawyer specializing in asylum and criminal law from the law firm Becher & Dieckmann.
On the first day of the seminar, the participants were welcomed by the IRZ General Director Veronika Keller-Engels and the Head of Section for Northern Africa / Middle East, Mohamed Montasser Abidi.
At the two-day event, the participants dealt with key questions of refugees’ residence in Germany. The topics under discussion were political asylum, subsidiary status, exceptional leave to remain, departure, subsequent immigration of family members and general procedural issues.
Further issues dealt with were:
The fundamentals of the German constitutional law and the importance of fundamental rights,
the organisation of the courts in Germany including general structures and procedural principles and
the fundamentals of general civil law, social law and German criminal law.
It was particularly important for the participants of the seminar to learn about opportunities of working as legal professionals in Germany.
Just like in the previous year, the event met with a very positive response by all parties involved. The participants were very interested and committed and discussed many practical issues from their every-day life.
The IRZ will continue and follow up on this project due to the unanimously positive feed-back.
