Ian Scott Public Interest Internship Program - Osgoode Hall Law ...

for funding of this sort are often limited and certainly few and far between. I also felt that the Ian
Scott Program presented a chance to actually discover my own interest in the law, while at the
same time contributing in meaningful ways to worthwhile causes and projects aimed at reducing
societal inequity and injustice.
And so, when the time came to consider what I was going to do with my summer after
completing a gruelling first round of law school, I decided that I would get my feet wet in the
matters to which that I had always had a passion-African development and politics. I met with
professor Tieku and informed him of the available options I had discovered at Osgoode during
my first year of studies. He encouraged me to contact the African Union and put together a
proposal for a research project that would actually allow me to contribute significantly to some of
the African Union’s most pressing concerns. After researching some of the matters that the
African Union had been engaged with over the last year or so, I decided that I would draw on
some of my past research experience with international organisations, to design a project that
would be at the heart of the African Union’s current agenda.
As an undergraduate student at U of T, I had been involved with a project appropriately
called the G8 Research Group. The G8 Research Group is an organisation founded by
professor John Kirton and a number of his former graduate students and colleagues, at the
Munk Centre for International Relations, located at the University of Toronto. The group also
comprises a number of student analysts, who every year, assess the compliance of G8 Memberstates
with official pronouncements and platforms on issues that concern Member-states of the
G8 as well as the global community. As a student analyst, I was responsible for researching and
writing on the compliance of G8 Member-states to their stated declarations during the annual G8
summits. Adapting this idea, I thought about the possibility of utilizing a similar strategy towards
the design of a compliance rubric that would measure the progress of AU Member-states with
directives that had been adopted by the African Union during annual Heads of States summits,
in particular those pertaining to the newly adopted African Charter on Democracy, Elections and
Governance.
With the assistance of Professor Tieku, I managed to contact various senior staff at the
African Union Commission’s Political Affairs and Legal Affairs department and thus, sent them a
copy of the project I intended to work on during my time there. They would eventually approve of
the project and instructed me to get into contact with their human resources department in order
to obtain official documents for processing and confirming the internship. I received these
documents and promptly completed them. When the time finally came to apply for the Ian Scott
Internship Program, I would use these documents along with the copy of my proposal as part of
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