Pilot Course on Public Interest Lawyering

Vitit Muntarbhorn is a Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of  Law, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok.  He is a graduate of  Oxford University (M.A.,B.C.L. (Oxon.)) and Universite Libre de Bruxelles (Licence Speciale en Droit Europeen (Brux.)).  He is also a Barrister at Law (the Middle Temple, London). 

He has helped the UN in a variety of  positions, including as : member of  UN Secretary General’s Civil Society Advisory Board on Prevention of  Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse; member of  Committee of  Experts on the Application of  Conventions and Recommendations, ILO; independent expert on UNESCO Advisory Board for Global Education Monitoring, representing the Asia-Pacific Region; member of  Advisory Board, UN Human Security Fund; member of  Advisory Board, UN Voluntary Fund for Technical Cooperation on Human Rights.

On human rights issues, he has held a number of  UN posts, in particular the following: UN Special Rapporteur on the Sale of  Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography; UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; UN Independent Expert on Protection against Violence and Discrimination based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.  He was the Chairperson of  the UN appointed Commission of Inquiry on the Ivory Coast (2011) and a member of  the UN appointed  Commission of  Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic.  In 2021 he was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council as UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of  human rights in Cambodia.

Sara Hossain is a barrister practicing in the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, mainly in the areas of constitutional, public interest and family law. She is a partner at the law firm of Dr. Kamal Hossain and Associates, and serves pro bono as the Honorary Executive Director of the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust. She is a member of the Board of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture, and associated with several international civil society initiatives (the Advisory Board of the Open Society Justice Initiative, the Advisory Committee of the Women’s International Coalition on Gender Justice (WICG) the Bureau of South Asians for Human Rights, as and the International Commission on the Chittagong Hill Tracts).

In 2016, Sara was appointed by the President of the UN Human Rights Council to serve as a member of the Group of Experts on Accountability in the DPRK, and from July 2018 to March 2019 as a member of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Gaza Protests of 2018. Sara also participated in the Task Force on Justice, convened by Pathfinders International, focusing on SDG 16.

Sara ran the South Asia Programme at INTERIGHTS from 1997 to 2003. She was a founding board member of the South Asia Women’s Fund (now the Women’s Fund Asia) and served as a Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists.

Sara’s casework on women’s rights before the Supreme Court of Bangladesh has included among others, representing public interest petitioners, including BLAST, in writs challenging ‘fatwa’ violence (degrading punishments being imposed on women and girls accused of violating community norms on sexuality), ‘forced veiling’ and the use of the ‘two finger test’ as a form of medical evidence collection. She had also been involved in amicus/ third party briefs including in relation to constitutional litigation before the Supreme Court of Nepal in a case challenging marital rape as discrimination, before the European Court of Human Rights challenging the requirement of proof of force to establish rape (MC v Bulgaria), and to the ICC an amicus brief, with WICGJ and Naripokkho, on the issue of the deportation of Rohingyas from Myanmar.

Zhang Wanhong earned his Ph.D. in Law from Wuhan University School of Law, Wuhan, China, where he now holds the position of Professor of Jurisprudence.  He studies and teaches in the legal areas related to human rights, public interest and civil society.   He is the pioneer of rights-based disability studies in China and founding editor-in-chief of Disability Rights Studies in China.

Professor Zhang is one of the drafters of China’s first National Human Rights Action Plan. He is the author and translator of a number of books, and has published articles in both international and Chinese journals. He is one of the founders and the Executive Director of Wuhan University Institute for Human Rights Studies. 

He was the Edwards Fellow (2005) at Columbia University School of Law, New York, USA, and was named as Columbia’s first Greater China Public Interest Fellow (2013). He had visiting positions at a number of academic institutes at home and aboard, among them, the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights (Norway), Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (Sweden), Danish Human Rights Institute (Denmark), Academia Sinica (Taiwan). He is Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands China Law Centre, University of Amsterdam.

As the Director of Wuhan University Public Interest and Development Law Institute, Professor Zhang and his colleagues are actively working in the field of protection and promotion of human rights in China. He also serves as advisor to several international and domestic organizations. Recently, he was appointed as Chief Expert of the prestigious Wuhan University Institute of International Law.

Helena Whalen-Bridge is Associate Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore. A recipient of
multiple competitive research grants and the 2019 Teresa Godwin Phelps Award for Scholarship in Legal
Communication, her research interests include legal ethics and access to justice, legal narrative, and legal
education.

Publications in the field of access to justice include The Role of Lawyers in Access to Justice: Asian and Comparative Perspectives (CUP, 2022), Litigants in Person: Principles and Practice in Civil and Family Matters in Singapore, with Jaclyn Neo (SAL Academy Publishing, 2021), “Automated Document Assembly:
Access to Justice and Consumer Risk” (2020) Singapore Academy of Law Journal, and “The Conceptualization of Pro Bono in Singapore” (2014) Asian Journal of Comparative Law. Helena has received multiple NUS Teaching Excellence Awards, and she is an Expert with the UNODC’s Education for Justice project. Helena is a founding member of the Law Society of Singapore’s Project Law Help, which helps provide legal information and support to charities and social enterprises. She has been the Faculty Advisor for the Law Faculty’s student Pro Bono Group since its inception in 2005.

Patricia Ho is the Founder of Hong Kong Dignity Institute, Founding and Managing Partner of Patricia Ho & Associates and Principal Lecturer of the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. Much of her work involves defending the rights of minority groups in Hong Kong by way of seeking advancements and developments of government policies and laws through strategic litigation. Patricia also provides legal and strategic advice to a number of NGOs in Hong Kong, and works with both local and international bodies to advocate for the rights of marginalised groups, including refugees, asylum seekers and victims of human trafficking.

In 2015, Patricia represented Mr. ZN to bring a judicial review – ZN v Secretary for Justice & Ors – to encourage the government to consider introducing specific legislations to criminalise forced labour and human trafficking. She has provided trainings and seminars to the legal community in Hong Kong on avenues to protect victims of human trafficking and forced labour, and is a co-author of the Crimes (Amendment) (Modern Slavery) Bill 2019 which has been introduced in Hong Kong Legislative Council. In June 2020, Patricia was recognised by the U.S. State Department as one of ten global Trafficking in Person (TIP) Report Heroes.

Patricia is trained in Post Trauma Psychosocial and Mental Health Interventions for the Refugee Population.

Jinmei is the senior climate consultant of several ENGOs, including Friends of Nature and Pacific Environment. She focuses on climate change, environmental law and strategic transition of grassroots NGOs. She was the director-general of Friends of Nature from July 2021 to July 2024. She has worked as the head of the law and policy project of Friends of Nature from 2018 to 2021, and her job was focusing on environmental public interest litigation environmental legislation and policy advocacy.
Jinmei has more than 15 years of professional experience in China and Southeast Asia. She has worked with ClientEarth China Project as a lawyer from 2017 to 2018 and focuses on legal capacity building and legislation. Before ClientEarth, she has worked as the Mekong legal coordinator of the Mekong Legal Program of EarthRights International in Thailand since 2015, focusing on Chinese overseas investment in Southeast Asia. Before joining ERI, Jinmei worked with the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims (CLAPV) for six years, which is China’s most established group of environmental lawyers, led by Prof. Wang Canfa. She worked as an environmental public interest lawyer representing pollution victims from communities across China.

Tze-wei Ng is a Hong Kong-based lawyer with the private wealth team of international law firm Stephenson Harwood, with a focus on philanthropy and charity law, as well as ESG (environmental, social and governance). 

She was formerly Deputy Director for Asia with PILnet, and led the setting up of the Hong Kong Pro Bono Clearinghouse and other regional pro bono efforts. During this time she and team liaised with various law firms, law schools, bar associations, international organisations and NGOs around the region in designing innovative pro bono projects. One such project was the justice gap analysis report This Way: Finding Community Legal Assistance in Hong Kong, a project made possible by pro bono support, and which also illustrates how access to justice requires continued efforts and responses from both government legal aid and pro bono.

After returning to private practice, she remains active in her pro bono support to organisations serving marginalised communities. In recent years she’s also been keenly exploring the role of lawyers in supporting the growing practice of social entrepreneurship, social finance, impact investing and responsible businesses etc.. She sees these as exciting new areas of public interest law – as doing good increasingly goes beyond charity and donations, and requires a mix of non-profit and for-profit tools and structures.

Pillkyu Hwang is a lawyer at GongGam Human Rights Law Foundation and a former adjunct professor in
charge of the international human rights law clinic at Seoul National University (SNU) Law School.
The main areas of his advocacy, research and fieldwork include international human rights, migration, refugees, business and human rights, international adoptees, alternative child care, North Korean escapees, disaster and human rights, detention and human rights and access to justice in general both in Korea and Asia. He graduated from SNU with an LL.B. and has earned his PhD in public international
law at the same university. He was a visiting academic at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) of Oxford University in 2007, and a visiting fellow at the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School in 2011-2012. He has been the Human Rights Committee coordinator of the Korean Bar Association (KBA) for 8 years and is now the chair of the KBA’s Special Committee on International
Human Rights. He was a member of the Reform Committee within the National Human Rights Commission in 2017 and has been a President-nominated commissioner of the Special Commission on Social Disasters in Korea since 2018. He also has played a leading role in the Asian region, as the chair, in two major regional human rights networks, the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN) and the Asian Consortium for Human Rights Based Access to Justice (Hrba2j-Asia).

Senior Advisor to the Legal Empowerment Network, Namati

Marlon has more than two decades of experience in legal empowerment work, having devoted practically his entire career to social justice and human rights lawyering. He has combined grassroots education activities with active involvement in strategic litigation on human rights and public interest issues, policy reform work on social justice legislation, and justice system reform programs on improving access to justice.

From 2008-2017, Marlon was the Coordinator of the Alternative Law Groups (ALG), a coalition of twenty (20) legal resource NGOs in the Philippines with distinct programs that are primarily concerned with the pursuit of public interest, respect for human rights, and promotion of social justice. He previously served as a civil society member of the Philippines’ Open Government Partnership (OGP) Steering Committee. From 2011 to 2015, he was the Vice-Chairperson for the Basic Sectors of the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC), a multi-agency and multi-sectoral body headed by the Philippine President and composed of heads of major departments of the national government, representatives of local governments, and representatives of fourteen (14) civil society sectors.

Marlon is a professor at the Ateneo de Manila University School of Law, where he received his Juris Doctor degree in 1994. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Management (Major in Legal Management) from the College of Arts and Sciences of the same university.

Asfinawati has been practicing as a human rights lawyer since 2001. She dealt with human rights subject particularly on labor issues including migrant workers, religious freedom or belief, women, and fair trial. She experienced as a lawyer at district court level to constitutional court including judicial review on religious defamation Law. After becoming a director of Jakarta Legal Aid Institute in 2006 – 2009, she is a chairperson of Indonesia Legal Aid Foundation for 2017-2021. After experiencing some litigation and policy advocacy she trusts more in organizing and educating to make changes.

Haya Emaan Zahid is a Barrister-at-Law with more than 11 years of experience working as a legal empowerment professional. She is nominated by the Government of Sindh as a legal expert for the Committee for the Welfare of Prisoners ( a committee that has been providing legal aid, assistance and empowerment to prisoners in Sindh since establishment in 2004). She has been working within the prison landscape both at the grass roots and policy and research level having made key contributions to reforming prison legislation in Sindh. Haya has worked as a special assistant/ co-opted member for federal government committees notified to improve the situation of prisoners across Pakistan. Haya is a member of the Sindh Public Safety and Police Complaints Commission , National Commission on the Status of Women and Board Member of the Legal Aid and Justice Authority. She is a founding member of the Legal Aid Society where she started working in the role of a Project Director and is now the CEO.