STREET LAW FOR CZECH AND SLOVAK YOUNG ROMA MUSICIANS

For almost seven years, Street Law has been a part of the curriculum of the Prague Law School. Over the years, law students have taught law at public and private grammar schools, high schools, business schools and also some vocational schools, mostly located in the Prague region. They were all secondary schools and predominantly ethnically homogenous, since members of the largest Czech minority, the Roma, for various reasons hardly ever attend these schools. Last summer, however, a group of Prague Law School students and recent graduates travelled to Eastern Slovakia to organize Street Law workshops for Roma teenagers. This text tells the story of their journey, reflects their teaching methodology and experience and offers a perspective of a law student participating in the workshops.

Practice Report: Clinic, the University and Society communities in Eastern Slovakia.As Ida Kelarová's web pages put it, the aim of this extraordinary project was to bring "music and joy of music into places, which almost nobody wants to know about and which are symbols of social exclusion, poverty and life without any perspective". 5ereas the main goal of the summer schools is to provide gifted Roma children and youth from socially disadvantaged backgrounds an opportunity to develop their talents, the whole project also attempts to motivate them to continue with their studies and become concrete examples of educated, cultivated and successful Roma that may serve as good examples both for the Roma communities and the general population.Since due to historical and sociological circumstances the Roma communities in both countries tend to be rather neglected, undereducated and underdeveloped, society tends to look down on them and often treat Roma as secondary citizens. 6 important aspect in this regard is that the Czech society is ethnically and nationally rather homogenous. 7The largest national minority are the Roma8 and their tensions Practice Report: Clinic, the University and Society with the majority population represent an important source of instability for the Czech Republic.In the dominantly white Czech population, for example ethnically and culturally very similar Slovaks tend to easily assimilate or generally fit well with the majority, while the visibly-different Roma stand out.During the last decade, the number of ghettoes in the Czech Republic doubled, and the majority of their inhabitants are the Roma. 9At the same time, anti-Roma demonstrations and protests intensified, with peaks in 2011 in the Northern Czech Republic and in 2013 in the south of the country.
International human rights protection bodies have repeatedly expressed their concerns about this situation and stressed that although the state passed a number of strategic materials targeting the integration of the Roma minority, these documents in practice mostly fail to be implemented.The Czech Republic is being criticized for discrimination against the Roma in many areas of daily life, including housing, labour market, health care and education. 10Practice Report: Clinic, the University and Society Discrimination in the educational system is repeatedly being pointed out by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (disproportionate number of the Roma children are sent to specialized schools with limited curriculum, which reduces their future career opportunities). 11The discriminatory nature of the Czech education system was also confirmed by the 2007 decision of the European Court of Human Rights, D.H. and Others v. the Czech Republic, where an indirect discrimination against the Roma children in access to education was stated. 12spite this framework, Ida Kelarová and her team attempt to challenge these common prejudices towards Roma and through music and rich Roma culture give Roma children a chance to live a full life. 13These aims of the Roma choir project perfectly meet the aims of Street Law programmes,14 so it therefore seemed only logical to join the team of Ida Kelarová and prepare for her young musicians several workshops aimed at increasing their legal literacy.
Using Street Law to work with minorities and marginalized groups in society is of course not our invention.In fact, Street Law has always used interactive methodologies Practice Report: Clinic, the University and Society METHODOLOGY OF OUR WORKSHOPS 21 Didactically, to organize Street Law seminars at Roma summer school was a real challenge.We had to prepare our programme for a group of forty to fifty teenagers aged ten to twenty, who were coming from several communities, diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and from two different jurisdictions. 22We knew only little about their previous knowledge of law, though we presumed that they had rarely come across introduction to law in their schools.We were also warned that some of the children from Slovakia might not clearly understand our language (Czech and Slovak are fairly similar, though not identical languages) and that the average attention span of children will be rather low.To sum up, the group was rather large and extremely diverse.
Our team was lucky in two regards.Firstly, there were many of us.The team consisted of five current law students,23 three recent graduates and one member of the faculty. 24condly, we were able to join the summer school a couple of days before our Practice Report: Clinic, the University and Society workshops began.That allowed us to learn more about the participants of the summer school, their prior experience with law, expectations from the legal workshops as well as their personal histories and it equally helped us to become part of the summer school before we officially took over the role of teachers and thus significantly eased the process of creating an atmosphere of common workshop not so strictly divided into "we the teachers" and "you the students".
When reflecting on our preparation for the workshops and their realization at the summer school, there stand out several principles we tried to follow.Since our experience might be beneficial for the readers, we will describe the principles as well as our experience with adhering to them.

Build the content of the workshops on the experience of the Roma participants.
Prior to the workshops, we met with the organizers of the summer school, identified several typical situations, in which participants most commonly come across legal rules (entering a shop and being closely observed by the security, being denied access to a public disco bar, being refused service in a local restaurant), and built our workshop sessions around these scenarios.Moreover, we included in the workshops also examples of those common legal conducts in which there further exists a significant risk of discrimination (entering into a lease contract or a contract of employment, being Practice Report: Clinic, the University and Society forced to vacate an apartment, searching for a job).Apart from these legal issues, we also prepared an activity aimed at improving their financial literacy, since financial difficulties are common among the Roma and often lead to consequent legal difficulties.
We did not limit ourselves to situations which the teenagers are likely to encounter in the near future (e.g.renting an apartment), but included situations that their parents, relatives or neighbours might need to solve as well.In this regard, we followed the mission of the whole summer school, which is to educate future Roma elite, whose role will be to help not only themselves, but also the people around them.
Building the workshops around the concrete experience of the Roma participants with legal rules brought one anticipated, but still troublesome finding.In their everyday lives, they come across legal rules in a far more explicit and harsh way than we do.Whereas we typically realize concrete legal norms (apart from legal talk among lawyers or in legal classes) when we receive a speeding ticket, cross on the red light or forget to buy a public transport ticket and realize it only when on a bus, their contacts with the law include a number of different situations.They are being interrogated by the police or at least asked to show their ID, they are being threatened by security that they will call police to inspect their backpacks, they are being summoned by the court as witnesses.
Encouraging them to share their experience with law during the workshops increased the authenticity of their content and motivation of the participants, but also placed us Practice Report: Clinic, the University and Society into an inconvenient position of those who represent the legal order that proves to be vastly unfair.We were those who -at least in the eyes of the participants -knew the legal rules, we were as white as the policemen, we enjoy benefits of the world that discriminates against them.
However unpleasant this position was, we felt it was necessary not to hide from this reality and openly talk about our perception of the law.After all, we had neither designed the legal system nor were we uncritical advocates of it.We did, however, know more about the rights and duties that law gives to individual roles than the participants of the summer school and were better able to describe consequences of certain behaviours.In our experience it worked well to share our critical comments on the current way the legal system or its individual actors operate (e.g.racial behaviour of the police) and search together with the participants for the right way to handle the concrete situation, even though it might have involved an unfair policeman.25

Be reasonable, not too ambitious.
One might easily tend to overload the content with too much information and activities.
After all, there are so many interesting things they should definitely hear from you! Practice Report: Clinic, the University and Society However, it also put higher demands on us, since these activities had to be adapted depending on the age of participants.We could not simply repeat the same workshop five times, since the group of young adults was able to explore the topics much deeper than a group of 14-year-old participants, to whom we still needed to make the topic useful and interesting, but in a much more simple way.

Precise planning is a must.
Eventually, it was not impossible to coordinate nine teachers running six activities for thirty children at one moment.However, it really paid off to schedule everything accurately, even though we had to anticipate that the plan could change any minute due to external causes.Since most of our workshops relied on precise timing, prior to each of them it was necessary to determine who will set and keep the precise time.For example when we were working with small groups in different locations, we always needed to set a precise time to be back in the main hall for the next part of the workshop, so we avoided the unpleasant situation where everybody would have been waiting for one last delayed group.It also turned out to be very beneficial to have one team member as a back-up for each workshop without a special task, supporting the others with their difficulties and keeping the time.Cooperation between team members during the whole time was crucial, since we only had two days to carry out our workshops and we wanted to use our limited time effectively.
Practice Report: Clinic, the University and Society move into the flat of your boyfriend and terminate your current lease agreement.When can you legally do it?"),gave students necessary documents and let them work and then talked about the solutions they proposed.All of these activities worked well with our audience and brought sometimes abstract topics down-to-earth.

ACTIVITIES THAT WORKED WELL WITH OUR PARTICIPANTS
Based on the principles stated above, we put together several activities.Some of them we knew from previous teaching, some we prepared especially for the Roma summer school.These are the activities that worked well with our audience: 1. Which labour contract to enter into?Participants were given three versions of a labour contract and asked to choose the contract that was best for them.All three contracts contained several changes (number of working hours, the amount of salary, duties) and were thus easily distinguishable.Participants worked in threes and their choice served as an opener for a discussion about a labour contract, its importance and necessary requirements.

Which rights belong to me?
Participants were given a list of all of the human rights that the law guarantees them.After going through them and making sure everybody understood what each right means, they had to choose those rights that they believed that they were entitled to.Legally, all rights on the paper belonged to them, but the Practice Report: Clinic, the University and Society shop and would be threatened that the police might be called.Both scenarios worked really well, since the participants could pour their own experience, attitude and temperament into their roles and at the same time they were not too difficult to prepare and play.It served us as a good vehicle for talking about the feelings and goals of the characters in the stories and smoothly opened the topic of discrimination and legal powers of individual actors -a waiter, owner of the restaurant, security and the police.

Extremes. An activity during which participants express their opinion on certain
issues by placing themselves on the line in between two extremes (e.g. the degree to which they approve or disapprove of capital punishment).Their position reveals their own unique view of the matter and makes them realize what they think about the issue.
For us it was an important introductory activity which helped us to map the views and opinions of the participants (e.g. the frequency with which they experience discrimination, environment they come from and scope of their legal knowledge).It also worked as a good icebreaker, since all the organizers of the workshop played with the participants and revealed their own views.Moreover, it was interesting to observe that in a number of questions Roma and non-Roma were nicely mixed in their replies.

HOW WAS THIS STREET LAW DIFFERENT FROM STREET LAW IN ORDINARY CLASSES?
-LAW TEACHER'S PERSPECTIVE Despite having taught for seven years at different secondary schools and high schools in Prague, teaching at Roma summer school has been a new and unique experience for me.It was different from other teaching I am used to for various reasons.Some of them were technical -there were no desks in the "classroom" (in fact, there was no classroom at all, we taught all over the location where the summer school was taking placeinside the building, in the corridors as well as in the garden), participants arrived from various cities from two countries and their familiarity with the legal language or even more elaborate common language was limited and I had to pay particular attention to the words I was using.I realized that I frequently use many fancy, long or sophisticated words that make my speech less understandable.
Apart from these technical differences, there were several more fundamental ones.
Firstly, the character of the Roma's prior experience with the law, the police and instances of discrimination were very different from my previous experience from classrooms.With a little bit of simplification I may say that up to now, I have been teaching law mostly to the members of the majority. 26This time, I had to adopt a truly Practice Report: Clinic, the University and Society different perspective, which was both more demanding and humiliating for me.
Especially when in the process of preparing the workshop (e.g.searching for a theme of a role-play) I had to put myself in the place of somebody discriminated against and then meet the person face to face and hear that he truly experienced those horrible situations and feelings which I only imagined for the sake of designing my session.Many times during those two days of workshops I realized how unproblematic my life is in some regards, purely because I am a member of the majority and not of (especially Roma) ethnic minority.
Secondly, I realized that teaching law to the Roma minority felt different because law stands out for them as something even more important and dangerous than for the members of the majority in society.For most of the regular secondary school students, legal rules predominantly represent the way to understand the legal system and save time and money in the future, to avoid being fooled by deceitful dealers or unwilling workers in public offices.For the Roma, knowledge of the law might actually save them from far more serious troubles, including jail.However, it might work the other way round, since knowledge of the law and your rights might put you in a more challenging or dangerous situation, e.g. when standing out against an oppressor or the person who discriminates against you, referring to your rights, calling for a legal action.There is indeed some bliss in the ignorance and bitterness in knowledge.

Practice Report: Clinic, the University and Society
Thirdly, the experience of Roma teenagers with law made me realize how complex and unclear the legal system is and how naive is the fiction that everybody has the duty to know the law. 27Even lawyers frequently lose themselves in the web of legal rules and their amendments and most of them never had to deal with any of the troubles members of the Roma ethnic minority face on an everyday basis.Translating legal duties into an understandable language seems the least help that lawyers can give lay people, especially from minorities as underdeveloped as the Roma people in the Czech and Slovak republics.

HOW WAS THIS STREET LAW DIFFERENT FROM STREET LAW IN ORDINARY CLASSES?
-LAW STUDENT'S PERSPECTIVE Since I really enjoyed the "classical" Prague Street Law programme, in which I taught at a good Prague public school, I took the opportunity to be a member of the team teaching at the Roma summer school, which was a rather different experience in many regards.The whole project was interesting and challenging from the very beginning and in the following paragraphs I would like to share my experience.
To begin with, the whole planning process was extraordinary and also partly complicated by the structure and size of our team.During my Street Law practice I was Practice Report: Clinic, the University and Society only planning the lessons and teaching with one more law student.This time we had to harmonise the time, ideas and thoughts of nine people, which was not always easy.Moreover, we did not all know each other prior to coming to Slovakia (I have personally met most of the team members just twice before) and we were coming from different backgrounds.Some of us had more experience with teaching than others; some of us were younger students as opposed to some of us who have already been practicing law for a few years.Despite these handicaps, I am happy to conclude that the team work went very well.
As unsure as I was about the final success of our workshops prior to coming to Slovakia, I was eventually nicely surprised by the attitude of the participants of the summer school.They were all very friendly, polite, respectful, willing to cooperate and keen to learn.They were very open, which was both overwhelming (it brought special energy into the workshops) and puzzling (despite their openness, some of them tended not to admit that they were lost at the activity; we learned we needed to keep asking and making sure they were following the lesson).As easily as they got excited about some activity, just as easily they could lose interest in another activity, in which they were not successful.When lost, some of them blindly followed the others in their reactions.Therefore, it proved to be effective to give individual roles to everybody, which they could not copy.I believe it is important to remember this experience for the future.
Practice Report: Clinic, the University and Society children are experiencing bullying by security while shopping for groceries, or have been refused service in a restaurant.When trying to give concrete pieces of advice to them on how to react in these situations, I realised how hard it actually is to fight discrimination, despite all the legal instruments, which are available on paper and studied at law schools, but have very unclear results in reality.
Clearly, the social dimension of this project is enormous, as the content of the workshops can be really beneficial for the participants of the summer school and it is only fair to give them a chance to familiarise themselves with the basics of law.
Therefore, I hope this project will continue in the future.I definitely used the basic didactical skills I learned in ordinary Street Law; on the other hand, I had to work in a larger team, which needed to be much more flexible, and in many regards I experienced a lot of new things, including the designing of the workshops and working with a diverse group of children, who were all members of a discriminated minority.It is hard to say who learned more from the workshops, whether us, or our students.