The Legal Assistance through Refugee Clinics (LARC) project, housed in the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, aims to provide support and guidance to refugee legal clinics in the Central Europe and Baltic States region.

Through skills development events, professional consultation, and the facilitation of a regional network of clinicians, LARC’s role is to empower refugee legal clinics to provide the most effective assistance to asylum seekers and refugees.

This site contains a collection of resources that are primarily intended for refugee law clinics (RLC) in Central and Eastern Europe but may also be useful to a wider audience. The various sections of the site contain information on establishing and running a refugee law clinic, tools aimed at helping clinicians with their every-day work and additional resources. The site also contains an online forum for clinicians where they can discuss asylum-related issues.

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee’s Legal Assistance through Refugee Clinics (LARC) project website went on-line today, providing an on-line resource for refugee legal clinics, professors, managers, and students as they conduct their work. The site, which will be continuously updated, is also a good resource for individuals interested in what refugee legal clinics do. Future web projects/developments include a web-based international asylum law reader complete with recommended curricula for courses of different duration and the relevant international binding and non-binding instruments of international asylum law.

Refugee Law Clinics

This section looks at starting, developing, and running a refugee law clinic. It is hoped that these practical resources will help existing clinics improve their services and facilitate the development of new clinics.

Setting up a Clinic: This section contains an overview of the concepts of clinics and contains information about setting one up.

Managing a Clinic: This section contains information about managing the operations of an existing clinic.

Funding: This section looks at the all important issue of how to fund a clinic.

Clinics of the Network: Here you can find links to web pages for all of the individual clinics in the network. Each page provides an overview of the structure and activities of the clinics.

Skills Development

These sections contain a selection of tools intended to help clinicians improve their existing skills. The tools collected here should not be considered authoritative. Other tools probably exist that would be very helpful for clinicians to have access to. As such, we would appreciate it if you would send to us anything you think we should add.

Working with Asylum Seekers: This section contains information relating to working with asylum seekers (ie. interviewing skills, working with interpreters, as well as age, gender and diversity issues). For the relevant case law please see the Refugee Law Reader website.

Integration and counselling: This section provides information related to counseling recognized refugees (ie. integration issues).

COI: This section contains tools and opportunities for clinicians to improve their understanding of country of origin information and research skills.

Policy Advocacy: This section focuses on policy advocacy and lobbying with resources and links.

Educational Opportunities: This section contains a list of various formal educational opportunities for those interested in refugee law and related disciplines.

Internships and volunteering: This section contains a listing of internships and other volunteer opportunities related to refugee law.