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.

Shadows of the Past

[What is this doing greeting visitors to one of Poland's foremost institutes for European Studies?]

I saw this interesting installation when the Talking Bear took me to his faculty, the Institute of European Studies of Jagiellonian University. I didn't recall a swastika-shaped fountain being in the hallway when I was an undergraduate there.

It turns out that the fountain comes with the building - the institute had since moved to a Nazi-built WWII-era castle on the outskirts of Kraków.

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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.

English: the new regional language of the Netherlands Part 2

(A language map from Ethnologue. All but one of the (European) Netherlands traditional languages either has or has applied for ECMRL protection, and speakers of the remaining one (Vlaams) benefit from a 99% literacy rate in Dutch)

(A language map of my favourite part of the world from Ethnologue. Saba and Statia are so tiny that they are not named - they are the bits of the Netherlands Antilles that are not in a box, just NW of St. Kitts and Nevis)

It may be useful to examine the case for granting Sabans and Statians protection to use English in public and private life by investigating what the (European) Dutch government has done with other minority languages on its territory. The European Charter for Minority and Regional Languages (ECMRL) is "layered", in that once a state recognises a regional or minority language it can choose the level of commitment to its preservation and promotion. It can agree to be bound by the 8 fundamental principles and objectives of the charter ("Part II"), or it can go further and apply "Part III" - detailed rules in various fields including education, judicial authorities and the media. Part III is in itself variegated, allowing for a country to increase its level of commitment to a language when finances and political will allow.

The Netherlands currently extends "only Part II" protection to three languages: Limburgish, Low Saxon and Yiddish. Yiddish is a "non-geographic language" and hence isn't represented on the map above. Part II protection was requested by Zeeuws speakers in 2001.

Part III protection has been granted to the Frisian language, with the (European) Dutch government agreeing to be bound in the Province of Friesland by the provisions set out here in addition to those enjoyed by the "only Part II" languages.

I do not know the reasons why a Frisian tongue is a particularly privileged one in Holland. However if linguistic dissimilarity from Dutch plays a role, Statian and Saban English-speakers are well-placed to demand specific legal commitments under the ECMRL from their closer relationship with the mainland. That is, if two islands in the Caribbean can be considered "Europe".

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English: the new regional language of the Netherlands Part 1

(Me on Mount Scenery, Saba, 2003. This dormant Caribbean volcano is the highest point in the Kingdom of the Netherlands)

English can be considered a minority language in the Netherlands. Who could argue with that statement? Lawyers, that's who.

The terms regional or minority languages are defined in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML), an initiative by the Council of Europe to protect and promote the use of historical regional and minority languages in Europe.

Article 1(a) of the charter:

"regional or minority languages" means languages that are:

1. traditionally used within a given territory of a State by nationals of that State who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the State's population; and
2. different from the official language(s) of that State;

Languages used in Europe in the context of recent migratory movements are outside of the scope of ECRML. For example Arabic will almost certainly not become a minority and/or regional language in the UK due to the proposition that Arabic-speaking migration was not "traditionally used". The same would apply for English in the Netherlands regardless of how many Brits might make that country their home.

Following referenda in 2004-5 in each of the islands that make up the Netherlands Antilles, that country will be dissolved by July 2007 at the latest. Curacao and Sint Maarten will gain "country status" and the accompanying greater autonomy within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The smaller islands of Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius voted to become municipalities of the European part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, confusingly named the Netherlands. It is this constitutional shift which BoB suggests may lead to Dutch recognition of English as an official regional language.

English as the lingua franca of Saba and Statia (the other islands of the Netherlands Antilles use Papiamento) reflects the laissez-faire attitude prevalent in the days of Dutch colonialism: administrators didn't care what country the inhabitants were from as long as they were somehow useful and they behaved themselves. Many Sabans have Scottish blood - Johnson is a very common surname on the island. Unlike territories prized for their ability to produce, Statia was the "Golden Rock of the Caribbean" because of its international trade. Just as a Statian slave was more likely to toil in a warehouse than on a plantation, the warehouse owner was more likely to be non-Dutch. It might also have been relevant to Statia's linguistic history that the island's golden age was contemporaneous with massive trade with the United States.

This has resulted today in the fact that the primary language of instruction in schools on Saba is English, and has been since it took over from Dutch in 1986. Meanwhile although Dutch is taught in schools next door in Statia, the official Statian Government website is only available in English (Dutch has been "coming soon" for as long as I have been watching it), and islanders use English in daily life.

All of this leads to a situation where it may be relevant that although the ECMRL excludes protection and promotion of non-traditional migrant languages, it allows no exception for regional languages that are "new" to the country by way of the signatory extending its jurisdiction into additional territory. Furthermore the proposed status of the "kingdom islands" in European law - that of most remote region status (see Inforegio) - is the same as that of the French Caribbean islands, the languages of which were listed by the French government as potentially qualifying for ECMRL protection in a 1999 report (in French).

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Shami Chakrabarti: "Asylum" - the new dirty word?

(Shami Chakrabarti with Michael Ellman, Chair of the Solicitor's International Human Rights Group)

I recently attended a talk given by Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty on the subject of asylum. Liberty is a prominent civil liberties and human rights organisation in the UK. When defining the landscape of the subject SC proposed that asylum be thought of as a "connector" between human rights at home and the ethics of foreign policy.

The talk was at least partly a discussion on semantics of terms in the field of asylum and immigration. I am now fascinated by how use of the phrase asylum seeker is constricting the normal use of the word refugee, so much so that nowadays it has more of a legal meaning - you are only a refugee when a government has accepted you as one. SC gave the example of boat people in the 1980s being commonly described as refugees in the British media before they had reached land (and therefore any official government designation). Might Vietnamese boat people heading here or to another friendly country nowadays be called asylum seekers by the same media sources?

Another point which I found interesting was that of the definition of nearest safe country in the context of changing concepts of borders. Whereas large groups of displaced poor people may still see escape across the nearest border as the best way of putting themselves in the nearest safe country, cannot any country with a direct flight connection to the country of escape also be regarded as "nearest" in many circumstances? The opportunity of escape might define what country was "nearest" to the escapee just as much as geographical distance.

The talk was organised by the Solicitors International Human Rights Group (SIHRG). The group's next event (on 22nd November 2006) sees Richard Gifford of Sheridans speaking on the Chagos Islanders.

"Notable Advocates" post on Shami Chakrabarti

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Shami Chakrabarti

At a SIHRG talk on Wednesday (possibly paraphrased):

"I am the Grim Reaper."

(the Director of Liberty suggesting that she is invoked whenever something ominous is happening in the world of civil liberties and human rights)

(click here to read about "Notable Advocates" entries)

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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.