In late September, representatives of the First Nationwide Congress of Legal Clinics of Ukraine gathered at the assembly hall of the Verkhovna Rada committee. Legal clinics are associations of law students and graduates, who provide free legal assistance to underprivileged citizens. Such clinics are novel to legal practice in Ukraine as they emerged only a few years ago. Today there are twenty-three such clinics in Ukraine’s seventeen regions. They operate as structural divisions of law faculties or as independent legal entities with close ties to law schools. While Kyiv alone has four legal clinics, there are none in Kherson, Vinnytsia, and Khmelnytsky. This is in part due to the fact that many law schools do not provide adequate training. Therefore far from every student can provide professional legal counseling.
Free legal assistance by students or young law graduates is a method of guaranteeing the constitutional principle whereby all citizens are equal when it comes to defending their rights. While there are scores of disadvantaged people in Ukraine, relations with government agencies often require filing various written solicitations. Yet people of scanty means cannot afford the legal fees payable for such documents. Congress participants say that even though we have only twenty-three clinics, even this proved enough to trigger positive changes in public consciousness, i.e. debunk the stereotype about the unaffordable and impossible legal assistance for the protection of civic rights.
Legal clinics favorably affect the professional growth of student counselors. Among those students who began their careers at legal clinics, there are eight candidates of scieces (law), a dozen practicing lawyers, and one judge, while most of them are teaching law.
Speaking of the volume of services provided to the population, the clinics serve roughly 600 clients per year. Every clinic is run by fifteen to twenty-five students, each of whom handles seven to fifteen cases every month. Two or three instructors help students in the process. Some of them provide counseling on the phone, while nine in ten present their cases in court. People turn to young lawyers with questions about unlawful dismissals and partition of property or estates, or request protection from unlawful actions by the uniformed services.
Ukrainian legal clinics are forming their own standards of good practice. As for the principle of their operation, it is the same for Europe, the US, and Ukraine — known as pro bono, which is Latin for free of charge. Yet free assistance entails certain costs, while Ukraine has yet to develop adequate legislation to institutionalize legal clinics, which prevents this useful undertaking from developing as a fully fledged legal service.
Active work is underway to develop a specialized course, methods, and textbooks that will help unify the operation of legal clinics. The Renaissance Foundation will support the clinics financially until 2007, during which time they should become self-financing. Incidentally, according to Markiyan Duleb, manager of the Supremacy of Law program of the Renaissance Foundation, the annual cost of running one legal clinic equals the annual tuition fees paid by two students. He believes that legal clinics are not a very costly business, considering the five-year course of studies at law schools with at least sixty-five students in each year. Further development of legal clinics in Ukraine envisions more extensive practical training for future lawyers. Legal clinics provide a unique opportunity to put theoretical knowledge into practice.
Despite the fact that legal clinics enable disadvantaged citizens to receive free legal assistance, it is still impossible for them to fully meet this demand. Twenty-three clinics in a country where every fifth citizen is officially poor are obviously not enough. A greater workload at every clinic may adversely affect the quality of services. Meanwhile, the development of the network of legal clinics is subject to creating conditions that would motivate law schools to establish them. Overall, legal education is available from nearly 200 law schools across Ukraine.
