Barrister or Bankrupt

Staff Mobility, Dual Careers and Spouse Employment - An Overview

[Why is the UN concerned with what its employees' spouses are up to?]

The recruitment process was gruelling. It wasn't the number of candidates applying: the job requires a very specific set of skills, and you expected only a few people in the world to apply. You placed the vacancy advertisement in the Economist, Wall Street Journal and other prestigious publications. Those selected for interview flew in from all corners of the earth, attracted by your organisation's reputation and the excellent salary on offer. And after all that, your perfect candidate turns you down because her husband can't get a work permit.

This is a scenario which sounds increasingly familiar to HR recruiters and headhunters worldwide. Not yet having an exotic foreign partner, I only realised the extent of the issue when I started working on it at the UN Dual Career and Staff Mobility Programme. Curiosity led me to see how other organisations in other sectors deal with the interlinked issues of staff mobility, dual careers and spouse employment.

When people in recruitment talk of "staff mobility", they are referring to the ability to move current or potential employees from their present place of work and residence to another. "Dual career" issues are those surrounding couples where both partners want to work, and "spouse employment" describes the challenge of the employee's spouse finding a job in the new location.

This stuff is big business. Specialist companies such as Cartus and GMAC Global Relocation Services (current slogan: "The World is Our Hometown") are doing rather nicely from consulting on and even handling their clients' global reassignments, and Ernst & Young sponsors the Institute for Global Mobility, where "Global Mobility Professionals" come together and discuss strategic trends and solutions.

Immigration lawyers are "Global Mobility Professionals" too. They are important because all this moving around of workers and their families takes place in a legally restrictive environment, the restrictions coming in the form of work permits, quotas, visa requirements and suchlike. Even members of supranational efforts such as the European Union largely apply their own rules on the sensitive issues of immigration, employment and nationality.

As with asylum these issues touch people deeply, and the ways in which countries legislate on the subject is very interest and sometimes quite revealing of social and political outlooks and trends. Here are some of my favourites:

A male ancestor in your family born on the Italian peninsula in the 19th century gives you a great chance of obtaining Italian citizenship (and hence the right to live and work in 27 EU countries). It doesn't even matter if he was born before Italy came into being as a country: if he was alive at the country's birth in 1861 he became a subject of the Kingdom of Italy, with the concomitant right to pass down that privilege.

Sources: Italian citizenship law of 5th February 1992 (in Italian)

Only a few quick formalities stand between a foreign bride of a Basotho man and a Lesotho passport. Women cannot confer Basotho citizenship on their foreign husbands through marriage.

Source: Constitution of Lesotho

Free movement of workers in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is more heavily based on one's profession than in the European Union, on which CARICOM is largely modelled. Musicians and Cricketers are some of the professions most free to move and work around the Caribbean.

Source: Caribbean Community Free Movement of Skilled Persons Act 1997 (Jamaica)

How to get a job at the United Nations

[The logos of just some of the specialised agencies of the UN. If your aim is to become an international civil servant, you should visit all of their websites, and lots more besides]

Since I started at the UN Staff Mobility Programme in April, I have been asked this question a number of times. I don't profess to know enough about networking or CV writing to write about those things, but what I certainly am familiar with from my time here is how to find vacancies in the UN System. And finding them all ain't easy.

What is colloquially known as "the UN" is more properly called the United Nations System, a network of international organisations such as UNICEF, the World Food Programme, etc. One of these member organisations is itself called the United Nations, and it is this confusion with naming which causes problems when looking for jobs.

The United Nations (the organisation, not the system) and each specialised agency (as all the other organisations in the UN System are called) are highly autonomous from one another. For example, they will all likely have their own legal departments. They also all have their own human resources departments, and conduct their own recruitment. This means that if you would like to be a "UN lawyer" (or accountant, security guard, whomever), you have to apply at a huge number of different places to have the best possible chance.

Two links are essential for finding vacancy announcements in the UN System. The "Galaxy" staffing system for jobs at the United Nations (again only the organisation, not the system), and the "Job Opportunities" page of the International Civil Service Commission (ICSC), which in turn links to the jobs pages of 39 specialised UN agencies and related organisations.

That's 40 different places to look, enough to test anyone's dedication to a UN career! However if you take the time to go through these links, you will have seen all of the currently advertised UN vacancies. Well... not exactly all: although the ICSC has linked to all of the specialised UN agencies, it didn't get all the jobs pages of entities formed as a joint venture between the different organisations, for example those of the United Nations Chief Executives Board for Coordination or the International Centre for Science and High Technology (it may be that vacancies on these sites are replicated at one or all of their parent organisations' sites, but I am not sure - if you are really aiming for all jobs and not just 99%, I suggest looking at these too).

If the above super-systematic method of regularly trawling through the websites of every agency in the UN doesn't appeal to you, you can have someone else do it for you: unjoblist.org is powered by a "screen scraping" robot which pulls down jobs as they appear on UN sites, and unjobs.org is run by the more traditional method of humans looking and manually posting jobs. Both sites list thousands of vacancies, but the fact that they are not run by the UN and the processes behind them cannot guarantee comprehensiveness means that using them instead of doing it yourself you sacrifice accuracy for time.

A prime segment of UN job hopefuls are our clients at the UN Staff Mobility Programme. As expatriates following their UN spouses or partners around the world, their job choices are often limited to working for international organisations due to immigration issues. Now you know what they do about finding a UN job - good luck!

United Nations Dual Career and Staff Mobility Programme

[Me at United Nations World Food Programme HQ, Rome, Italy]

Since April I've been at United Nations World Food Programme HQ in Rome, working on a very interesting project called UN Dual Career and Staff Mobility.

The UN moves a lot of its staff around. A lot. In an earlier age a regular UN couple would likely consist of one spouse working for the UN and the other staying home, whatever duty station happened to be "home" at the time. Nowadays this is rarely the case and a UN staff member is often accompanied around the world by his or her doctor/teacher/actor/otherwise-professional spouse (or increasingly, unmarried partner).

In almost every country where the UN sends staff any diplomatic immunity enjoyed by the UN couple does not extend to the right to work for the non-UN partner; spouses are still seen by host-country governments as merely a partner of the UN operative - often the rather humiliating designation partner of... is even written as spouse's official occupation into their official identity documents. It's a long fall from international lawyer to partner, as one of our clients recently wrote in an article about the difficulties she faced in a foreign country.

UN Dual Career and Staff Mobility was established to mitigate the problems faced by working expatriate UN spouses and unmarried partners. We advocate for this worthy cause from a Global Expatriate Spouse Association (UN/GESA) here in Italy, researching possible ways into national labour markets and supporting our clients through the establishment of Local Expatriate Spouse Associations (UN/LESAs). Being attached to the World Food Programme (WFP) is very useful, as the WFP is in most of the UN's most difficult duty stations. Often WFP spouses and partners are in the vanguard of establishing LESAs around the world and it is useful to benefit from their experience and contacts.

More on spouse employment, staff mobility, the United Nations and Rome very soon...

CELTA in Poland

[Squinting in the spring sun on the Wisła river in Kraków. Next to my head is Wawel Hill, site of the Royal Castle and the national cathedral]

I'm between jobs at the moment (really!), so I took the opportunity of spending a month in Kraków with the Talking Bear. We studied together here at the Jagiellonian University as part of our Polish degree course, and John loved it so much he emigrated the day after his finals. He's now firing on all cylinders with a translation bureau, a sideline teaching English & Linguistics and what must be the most uncommon name found in a Polish passport (John Beauchamp pronounced in Polish sounds something like Yon Bohamp). Thanks for having me, mate.

On the Bear's recommendation I signed up for a CELTA (Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults) course during my time here. What I thought would be a holiday of sorts and chance to start revising for law school turned into four weeks of late nights spent familiarising myself with a new set of jargon (Gap-fills at the Clarification Stage, anyone? How about a spot of Test-Teach-Test before the Gist Task?) and preparing for daily teaching practice in real classrooms with real students. I really enjoyed being thrown into the deep end and teaching from the second day of the course. My fellow trainees were a great bunch of very interesting people and it made the world of difference that we were so well supported by experienced and inspiring tutors. I hope they get round to reading this post and decide to stay in touch (not least because my classmates each owe me 25 złoty. Grrr)!

So the CELTA was enjoyably challenging and may prove useful as a means of earning extra income whilst abroad. Unexpectedly, learning to teach English also gave me some food for thought about how learning impacts upon the lawyer's profession.

When presenting complex legal argument in court, advocates need to keep the target of their advocacy (single judge, panel of judges, jury) with them - "because of point A, we submit point B, the effect of which is point C", etc. This can be extremely difficult to do and is one of the reasons why some want to abolish juries in complex fraud trials. A little CELTA methodology might be useful here.

The course encourages analysis of the way in which individuals prefer to study and the adoption of a style of teaching with this preference in mind. If your judge has an auditory preference, offer to read her the section of the statute before directing her to a written version. If your magistrate is teacher-dependent, be prepared for questions for which answers are already in the bundle you have given him -  he wants to hear you say it.

Perhaps I am stretching the metaphor between advocate and teacher - effective advocates must also be great salespeople, and the teacher-student / advocate-judge relationship are totally opposite in many ways. However essential to both professions is the skill of conveying information and some reflection on how humans (this includes judges!) best receive and retain information might result in a worthwhile advantage.

BoB recommends International House Kraków for anyone wanting to take a full-time CELTA course for as long as Magda Markiewicz and Declan Cooley are the course tutors. The fees are approximately half of what one would pay in the UK and even after accomodation a significant saving can be made. The course is very intensive however so make sure you leave some time for sightseeing before or after (but not during) the course.

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Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer. Because I don't currently have one.

End of an era

[Me with Judith March, Director of the PSU. I learnt so much working under her, and feel tremendously indebted.]

My contract at the Personal Support Unit (PSU) came to an end on Monday. I knew it was coming as I was temporarily covering my predecessor's maternity leave, however I must be finding it difficult to let go - last night I dreamt that the Director and I were showing Gordon Brown round the office.

In the 14 months I was in post the PSU has enjoyed many small successes. I was a mere witness to most, though there are a few triumphs I can take some credit for. LA and I produced a handbook for volunteers, an attempt to consolidate the charity's knowledge of assisting litigants-in-person into one document. Getting the tone right was no mean feat. A high-level editorial meeting was hastily convened after I wrote the following guidance for poorly volunteers: "Instructions for volunteers calling in sick: 1. Don't call in sick."

MB and I spent many a late night upgrading the IT systems. We reduced fiddlyness, delivered big productivity gains and increased security all at very low cost. The Pizza Guy had never delivered to "Royal Courts of Justice, Strand" before.

Under the stewardship of DC the office and the PSU Events Committee organised a very successful fundraising dinner in October. We raised almost half of the Unit's annual budget that night. The only thing that went wrong were the acoustics, as only a handful of the 550 guests could hear Lord Norwich or any of the other speakers. AC's words cheered me up no end at the end of the night: "I didn't need to hear it Filip. I've heard it all before".

It almost goes without saying that I gained so much more at the PSU than I could possibly have put in. This job made me certain of wanting to become a barrister. I spent cumulative weeks in the Court of Appeal, High Court, Royal Courts of Justice Costs Office and Wandsworth County Court. Judges often leave the PSU to explain to the litigant-in-person what has happened in court and I remember very vividly the first time a High Court judge and I exchanged knowing glances: "did you get all that, are you able to help"? "Yes my lord, no problem".

The PSU works in close cooperation with all of the major London-based legal charities and I was lucky enough to have worked with the Free Representation Unit, the Bar Pro Bono Unit, the Royal Courts of Justice Citizen's Advice Bureau, LawWorks, the Legal Aid Practitioners' Group, the Legal Action Group, the BPP Pro Bono Centre, PILARS. Many fantastic people who could be making pots of cash elsewhere but are instead committed to improving access to justice in the English legal system.

I have observed some fantastic advocacy, not only from trained lawyers. The Nigerian client who represented himself and stopped the Home Office deporting him by arguing that "transacting business" is not the same as "work". The client who has been pursuing her case for so long that it is a lead case on the subject of disclosure of documents. Some litigants even decide to represent themselves as they are convinced they will appear more sincere to the judge (note to all potential litigants-in-person: These are very rare exceptions to the fact that the system is not designed for unqualified people to speak for themselves. Get a lawyer, if you can).

The PSU volunteers are a breed apart and I cannot praise them enough. If you go to the PSU office you are bound to meet a future silk among the students. The non-student volunteers are a case study in breaking apart stereotypes of The Volunteer. Some might strike you as the type to have zero patience yet they will fill out endless forms for an illiterate client. Some are so busy they do half a day between sitting on the Magistrate's Bench and jetting off to Cape Town. Some commute in from Somerset to "do a day" at the PSU. At my leaving do I said that there are no better models of humanity, compassion and well-targeted intelligence to follow and I sincerely meant it.

Looking to the future, BoB thinks the Unit should go national and the Government should pay for a substantial part of it. Funding the PSU in the county courts should not be a resource battle between it and civil legal aid. We would all like everyone who cannot afford a lawyer to be represented to the fullest, however without deep reform I don't think this is possible. In the meantime a trained PSU volunteer can provide a very effective safety net from coming up against access to justice issues. They are cheap, too - three pounds for lunch plus travel expenses to and from home. Some even have freedom passes.

Mr. Brown, the Personal Support Unit is at the forefront of cooperation between the Public and Charitable Sectors. This alliance has been much-hyped of late, and I am absolutely convinced that the level of involvement between the civil servant and the volunteer isn't anywhere near what it could be to maximise the contribution of good people with free time. I have spent a little time at the Department of Constitutional Affairs and can report that the mandarins I met care an awful lot about improving things. It is exactly this position at the meeting-point of the Executive, the Judiciary, the Legal Profession and the Charitable Sector (infinitely more diverse than the rest) that has made the PSU experience so rewarding for me. I recommend a visit to Room M104, Royal Courts of Justice at your earliest opportunity.

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Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer. Because I don't currently have one.

Wandsworth County Court

 

(Wandsworth County Court dates from 1973)

The Personal Support Unit is currently running a pilot of its service at Wandsworth County Court in south-west London.

County courts are courts of first instance in the civil system (as opposed to Magistrate's Courts and the Crown Court, which try criminal cases), positioned below the relevant sections of the High Court and Court of Appeal. They can be found in major towns and cities around England and Wales, and are often where people first come into contact with the law. County courts deal with claims up to £50,000. Some also have a family jurisdiction.

As the nature of the cases differ from the charity's "first home" at the Royal Courts of Justice (RCJ) so too does the type of work the PSU does at Wandsworth. Clients there might be facing eviction from their homes, challenging a parking ticket or fighting for access to their children. The physical space is also very different; the 1970s three-court building at Wandsworth lacks a large building's facilities not to mention the RCJ's grandeur. The PSU presence goes some way to addressing the issue of support, and I have met more than a few people who prefer the less formal (and therefore less intimidating) atmosphere of modern court buildings.

The PSU can be found at Wandsworth County Court 9.30am to 4pm Monday - Friday. The telephone number is 020 8333 4366.

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Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer.

How to Watch Proceedings at the Law Courts

Every so often at the Law Courts I bump into a visitor to the building in a bit of confusion. They have (rightly) been told that the process of justice is conducted in public in England and Wales, and they want to see a trial. However they are not sure about how to get in to a court and what to do once there. Here is the definitive guide:

Outside the court there will be a noticeboard with a slip of paper attached to it. This will show the court number, the presiding judges and the start time of the case. "Not before..." means that the preceding case may eat up some of this case's time slot for today. "At risk" means that the case might be heard today, though all parties (and spectators) are warned that preceding cases may push the case into the next available slot in the court's calendar. A list of all the day's cases (the "cause list") are available on the day behind the enquiry desk in the main hall, or online the evening before. You can walk in to (and leave) a court at any time.

You MAY NOT normally watch a case marked "Private" or "No Admittance". These are sensitive cases (for example involving families) and it has been decided that the interests of the parties in maintaining confidentiality is greater than your right to view the case.

When entering a court:

• Switch off your mobile / ipod / electric toothbrush. You face contempt of court if you don't!
• Walk in and stop. Bow your head towards the coat of arms, which will be displayed behind or above the judge(s).
• Take a seat near the back. The first two or three rows are reserved for counsel and litigants-in-person. Don't worry if your seat creaks, some of the courts are very old and everyone is used to that!

When leaving, it's much the same. Just before you get to the door turn around to face the coat of arms, bow your head and exit. I hope you see an interesting case!

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Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer.

The Royal Courts of Justice

 

(The Royal Courts of Justice circa 1890. Now it's just my "office". Well, one room anyway!)

The charity for which I work is based in the Royal Courts of Justice (RCJ) on a street called the Strand in London. They are the largest civil courts in England and Wales, and the home of the High Court and Court of Appeal.

The RCJ is neo-gothic in character, the final large building in this style in London joining its illustrious cousins the Palace of Westminster, Tower Bridge and St. Pancras Station in 1882. It was designed by George Edmund Street, who was a practising solicitor before becoming an architect. The old courtrooms are priceless antiques in themselves, and are still in use today. The building's crowning glory must be the Great Hall. Resembling a gothic nave, its 80ft high vaulted ceiling shelters fantastic stained glass windows and is supported by 12 elegant columns. Pictures really do not do the Great Hall justice(!) and I recommend a visit the next time you find yourself in central London.

I do not think that English and Welsh legal costume would survive without buildings like this. Indeed it is here that gowned, bewigged practitioners of the law seem appropriately dressed in the courts and corridors. There is no doubt that the character of the place combined with the strange costumes is intimidating to many, but this character also underlines the seriousness of proceedings and allows observers to easily distinguish between people's different roles in the court.

The RCJ is open to the public Monday - Friday 9am - 4.30pm. Members of the public can watch all proceedings not marked "private" on the court door.

I don't think that anyone would deny that the "Law Courts" suffer from accessibility problems. There are miles of corridors. There are only three or four lifts, meaning that if you are in a wheelchair distances are often doubled as you must go via one of these lifts. However most parts of the building are accessible to disabled people and English Heritage and the Courts Service are doing a great job in keeping the RCJ a working building, serving the purpose it was designed for.

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Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer.

The Personal Support Unit

At the end of 2005 I started as Administrative Officer at the Personal Support Unit (PSU). There are two full-time salaried staff (the Director and me) and almost 100 volunteers, whose main role is the support of litigants-in-person ("lips" for short) who are conducting cases at the Royal Courts of Justice (RCJ) and the Prinicipal Registry of the Family Division (London's main family court building, located on High Holborn). There is also a pilot project at Wandsworth County Court.

There are many reasons as to why people represent themselves in court, but the most common are:

• Not being able to pay for legal services and ineligibility for legal aid
• Mistrust of lawyers and the belief that they will do a better job themselves
• Having to represent themselves because they arrive under the mistaken assumption that representation will be provided at the court

The Unit is sometimes seen as no more than a "hand-holding service" and what litigants really need is more and better legal advice, something we expressly do not provide. However having a sympathetic, confident volunteer to accompany a litigant around the vast building or in court is one of the services that is most requested by PSU clients. I am in no doubt that I have dealt with potential clients who dismissed the service as patronising before realising the full extent of what they were facing as unrepresented litigants. Whereas we don't provide legal advice we provide a range of ancillary services to facilitate obtaining legal advice, such as advising on the procedure for finding a solicitor or getting effective and timely help from other agencies, such as the Citizens Advice Bureaux.

The PSU is part-funded by the Department for Constitutional Affairs, but fundraises most of its money. The unit helped over court users in over 2000 instances in 2005.

The volunteers tend to be retirees and law students, though the opportunity to become a volunteer is open to everyone except clients, who can apply to become a volunteer two years after the PSU last helped them.

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Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer.