The Pat Finucane Centre (Northern Ireland)
During the summer of 2004 I participated in an International Human Rights Program internship at the Pat Finucane Centre in Derry, Northern Ireland. The Pat Finucance Centre is named after a human rights lawyer from Belfast who was murdered in 1989 by pro-British paramilitaries (the Ulster Defence Association). The Centre is involved with issues such as policing, documenting accounts of individual human rights cases, reporting on confrontations and abuses surrounding annual parades, investigating allegations of collusion between security forces and loyalist paramilitaries, analysing the implementation of Closed Circuit Television at sectarian interface areas, reporting dissident republican attacks, and studying truth commission findings along with relevant domestic and European human rights legislation.
I chose to intern in Northern Ireland because of my personal interest in the region along with my more general interest in international human rights. While there, not only did I learn a lot about the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland along with ongoing social and human rights concerns in the region, I also experienced first-hand the day-to-day running of a small non-governmental organization. Because the Pat Finucane Centre relies on private donors in order to maintain its independence, the full-time staff and Directors of the Centre were appreciative of summer interns who could assist with the daily running of the centre in addition to more long-term projects.
During my internship, a panel of independent human rights experts from South Africa, Scotland, and the United States carried out a two-week phase of interviews as part of an ongoing investigation at the invitation of the PFC into possible collusion between security forces and paramilitary groups in a particular set of murders during the 1970s. I, along with another intern, had the opportunity to attend and transcribe the majority of these interviews, which included testimonies by victims' relatives, witnesses, intelligence officers, community outreach workers, and members of the police. Not only did I learn a lot through observing and interacting with the panel, it was also a very moving experience to hear first-hand accounts from witnesses and relatives of victims, many of whom rarely spoke about these traumas over the past three decades.
In addition to my involvement with this independent human rights panel process, I also participated in the day-to-day activities of the centre. Some of this work included community outreach. I assisted, for example, with an event held in the town square to show solidarity between families in Derry whose relatives had been killed by British forces and Iraqi families in Basra who had also lost family members to British military force. In addition to community outreach, I also travelled to Belfast to act as one of several international observers of the Orange Order marches on July 12th. The mandate of these observers, many of whom travel annually to Belfast, is to document whether the parades conform with the guidelines set out by the Parades Commission of Northern Ireland and more generally to record any disturbances between the military, the police, and the civilian population. Although we did document the presence of certain paramilitary flags and sectarian tunes that violated Parades Commission guidelines, fortunately for residents the marches in the area we were observing passed off without violence.
Given my specific interest in Northern Ireland combined with my more general interest in international human rights law, I am very appreciative to have been able to spend a summer living and working in the environment that I did. This internship and the people I met during it certainly reinforced my desire to continue to pursue opportunities in international human rights in the future.
