CYIL 2013

MOOT COURTS ON ISSUES OF PUBLIC INTERNATIONAL LAW

MOOT COURTS ON ISSUES OF PUBLIC INTERNATIONAL LAW

There has been a quick rise in the number and quality of simulated court proceedings (so called “moot courts”) that the Faculty of Law of Charles University in Prague (PF UK) has taken part in during the last 10 years. Both as an undergraduate student and later as an internal postgraduate student of the Department of International Law of PF UK, I have personally taken part in many of these moot courts and witnessed the successes of teams I was member of as well as those of other teams. Since moot courts are one of the best ways to practice learned skills, I would like to present some of the moot courts that our students participated in and review their successes. There are many moot courts, and it is impossible to quote the names of all of them. So allow me to give some examples. As a member of the Department of International Law I am obviously going to focus on moot courts that deal with issues of public international law. However, even within this scope there are too many of them to be all named. Probably the largest and most worldwide known competition is the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition. 1 Others that I would like to mention here are, for example, the following: World Human Rights Moot Court Competition in Pretoria, European Human Rights Moot Court Competition in Strasbourg, 2 and others. The competitions are mostly international, i.e. there is usually a national round, where one or more teams are awarded with the best team award and are subsequently nominated as competing teams of the international rounds. It is also usual that the language of the competitions is English or French. Hence competing improves both the legal and language skills of the students. One of the best known, and also French language, competition is the Concours Européen de Droit de l’Homme René Cassin. 3 Let us begin with the so-called Jessup competition. It is a regular moot court that takes place every year and already has a very long tradition. The 55 th competition is going to be in 2014. The organizing entity is the International Law Students Association (ILSA), 4 though the national rounds in each country are usually organized by various people / organizations under the supervision of ILSA. For several years the Czech national rounds were organized by the Prague White and Case office, and in 2013 the rounds were organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. Both of these deserve many thanks for giving international law students the opportunity to compete and for kindly organizing the competition. It may be noted without exegaration that the competition is the largest moot court focused on 1 You can find interesting information on the weppage of the ILSA (organizor of the competition) http:// www.ilsa.org/jessuphome. 2 http://www.humanrightsmootcourt.org/about.php. 3 http://www.concourscassin.eu/index.html. 4 http://www.ilsa.org/about-ilsa.