My internship experience at the Venice Commission has been a very rewarding experience for me. As I have studied U.S. and international law as a Juris Doctorate degree and LL.M. candidate, working in the Venice Commission was a new experience for me to actually put my legal knowledge into real practice.
The European Commission for Democracy through Law, also known as the Venice Commission, is an advisory body of the Council of Europe on constitutional matters. The primary role of the Venice Commission is to provide its member states legal advice in align with European standards and international experiences. The Venice Commission mainly deals with constitutional justice, democratic institutions and fundamental rights, elections, referendums, and political parties. As of January 2018, there are 61 member states: 47 Council of Europe member states and 14 other countries, including the USA, Chile, Kazakhstan, and the Republic of Korea to name a few. Its permanent secretariat is located in Strasbourg, France, where I have completed my legal internship.
During the internship period, I have participated and completed various tasks related to the on-going works of the Venice Commission. To name a few out of many, First, I have researched and analyzed many cases from the European Court of Human Rights, other documents from international institutions, the Venice Commission’s rule of law checklist, and constitutional laws of the member states in order to finish the research reports, which were then used for specific member states’ requests for the Venice Commission’s Opinion on their draft laws. I made research reports for the states: Armenia, Romania, and Poland. Second, I have also organized worldwide news on constitutional justice issues in an alphabetical name of each state and compiled them into documents named observatories, which were then sent out to all the member States in order to update them on recent constitutional issues. Third, I have indexed Romanian election law and Lithuania’s constitutional law into specified legal fields, which will be uploaded on the Venice Commission’s systematic thesaurus database. Fourth, I have updated the Venice Commission’s References webpage by researching many international cases and institution’s documents, which is now publicly uploaded online.[1] And finally, I have also attended the Venice Commission’s weekly plenary sessions, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and the Grand Chamber Hearing of the European Court of Human Rights for the Navalnyy v. Russia case. Each type of work was very rewarding for me as I saw my works utilized and uploaded by the Venice Commission on its webpage.