Rachel Law
Society for Community Organization (香港社區組織協會)
Hong Kong, China
Hi everyone! I am a rising junior studying politics and economics at NYU’s College of Arts and Science. I am honored to be one of the Global Human Rights Fellows this year and am grateful for the opportunity to have studied alongside the other fellows over the past few months. I am excited to work on issues related to rights of prisoners and ethnic minorities in my home city, Hong Kong, over the summer.
This summer, I am working at Society for Community Organization (SoCO), a Hong Kong-based human rights organization dedicated to serving and empowering underprivileged communities through community organizing and the facilitation of grassroots, citizen-initiated advocacy. Some of the issues SoCO has focused on in the past include living conditions in cage housing and subdivided units, ex-offenders’ rights, and rights of new immigrants.
Since mid-May, I have begun working on my two projects under the guidance of my supervisor, Annie. My first project is on inmates’ rights to complaints and fair treatment in prisons and focuses on the improvement of the independence and transparency of prisons’ internal complaints system. My second project looks into the only legislation governing over racial discrimination in Hong Kong—the Race Discrimination Ordinance, which currently does not adequately tackle racial vilification on social media—and explores possible solutions to mitigate the gap.
While I spend most of my time conducting research and analysis into existing legislation and other scholar reports, working at SoCO is much more than mere paperwork. During my first few weeks here, I have already had numerous opportunities to interact with different stakeholders, including ex-offenders, government officials, and other scholars, attend various talks and workshops led by experts in the field, and help organize press conferences. I will hopefully hold press conferences for each of my projects at the end of my internship as well.
My experiences at SoCO so far has allowed me to get a better glimpse of the practical challenges to grassroots human rights and policy advocacy and to start to develop skills to navigate it through interacting with different parties. Through my work this summer, I hope to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of policymaking, as well as knowledge of the practical realities of the criminal justice system. Ultimately, I hope to explore how my experience might be useful for criminal justice reform in Mainland China through the “One-country Two-systems” framework.
In the coming few weeks, I will be writing more about my summer experience at SoCO, including what a typical workday is like and some challenges that I have encountered during the course of my internship. Thank you for reading and stay tuned!