Student interns at UNICEF in Malawi

Joshua Blum, Law '11, pictured with children during his summer 2009 internship with the Institute of Local Government Studies in Ghana, interned at UNICEF Malawi in the summer of 2010.

Joshua Blum, Law ’11, spent the past summer helping to transform the legal system for children in Africa. With assistance from the Dean’s Excellence Fund (composed of alumni donations), he completed an eight-week UNICEF internship in Malawi, a small southern African country of some 14 million people.

 Joshua joined a project associated with the Malawian government’s recent passage of a domestic bill that incorporates obligations under the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. He visited police stations, prisons and juvenile detention centres and reported on how practices there must change to meet the requirements of the new legislation.

Until the bill’s proclamation, Malawi’s criminal law made little distinction between children and adults. The new law will address the fact that many incarcerated youth still share cells with adults in detention facilities that lack resources for schooling, rehabilitation or vocational training. Young and old prisoners alike live “cheek-by-jowl” in squalor and endless boredom. Children frequently languish in cells for years because their files are incorrect or missing.

“It’s a human rights violation, but it’s not with evil intent,” Joshua says. “It’s just a lack of administrative capacity.”
Working with a lawyer, Joshua met and interviewed hundreds of children in criminal custody and ensured that their age, charge and duration of sentence remaining matched the information in their files.

The children’s living conditions shocked him.

“The worst part is actually where the kids sleep,” he recalls. “In some cases they were fenced off, but in most cases not. It’s just a lot of children having to sleep on top of one another in a really packed area.” At the end of the project, Joshua presented the government with reliable data about the number of children in custody and where current conditions stood compared to core juvenile-justice indicators.

“Being able to set up a working file system and get data to set a baseline for going forward was probably the most valuable thing we did,” he says.

Joshua also wrote a legal brief about police practices that violated Malawi’s constitution and international human rights law. For instance, police commonly detain street children in the cities simply because there is no alternative state care that will provide food and shelter. This assignment provided Joshua an instructive lesson:  human rights law can’t be viewed in a vacuum.

“Bringing street children into the criminal system essentially because they’re poor is a hugely alarming practice,” he says. “At the same time, in a country without functioning social welfare institutions, it was hard to suggest many feasible alternatives to the police.”
Joshua’s Malawi adventure gave him an insider’s view of the potential impacts and challenges of law and development work in practice – an invaluable experience for a student who hopes to work in the field one day.

According to Martin Nkuna, Joshua’s supervisor, UNICEF also benefitted. In a summary evaluation that rated Joshua’s work as “excellent,” he wrote, “Joshua’s analytical reports are likely to shape our future intervention in the area administration of juvenile justice and informal and formal victim support services.”

In such NGO internships, however valuable to a law student’s education, candidates usually work for free and travel and live at their own expense. “The trip [to and around Africa] wouldn’t have been possible without the funding Queen’s gave me,” Joshua says. “It’s hard for students to afford public interest options in the summer, and it’s support like the Dean’s Excellence Fund that makes participation possible, really.”

For more information on the law school’s funded public interest internships and the Dean's Excellence Fund for educational enrichment projects, see http://law.queensu.ca/international.html