It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome as a guest blogger Julie Veroff (right), who recently finished her MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Oxford, which she pursued on a Rhodes Scholarship.Julie is now the Executive Director of FACE AIDS, a non-profit organization dedicated to mobilizing and inspiring young people to fight AIDS and global health inequities. She earned her B.A. with Honors and Distinction from Stanford University in 2007. In the future, Julie plans to go to law school and pursue a career in public service.
Julie first worked in a refugee camp in 2006, when she established a women’s center and leadership training program in Mwange Refugee Camp in Zambia as a Project Facilitator with the nongovernmental organization FORGE. She has since interned with Human Rights First’s refugee protection and lifeline for Iraqi refugees program and at the U.S. Department of State.
Julie became interested in refugees’ access to justice while working in Mwange. Teenage girls often spoke of teachers demanding sex in exchange for good grades. When Julie asked whether they had anyone to report the problem to, they laughed. Her recent research in Meheba Refugee Settlement, Zambia, which formed the basis of the dissertation for which Oxford awarded her distinction, is discussed in her guest post below. Rather than look just at the rules and procedures of justice systems in refugee camps, Julie explored how refugees viewed and interacted with these systems in order to capture the socio-legal aspects of justice administration in a protracted encampment environment.Heartfelt welcome!
