Each student or group of students accepted to the programme makes a ‘commitment to action’ about a particular issue.

Akhil Ennamsetty (LLM Human Rights) will embark on a project titled ‘Centre for Rights Activism’ which aims “to provide quality legal aid to the victims of human rights abuse in the tribal villages of the Northern Telangana region in India” as well as creating general legal awareness.

Laura Glocker (MSc Criminology and Criminal Justice), Mattis Leson (LLM European Law), and Markus Lakenbrink (LLM Corporate Law) will undertake to “inform and educate the public and, foremost, pupils about the German Constitution to tackle misinformation, especially with regard to the freedom of speech.” The group will do this through preparing workshops and recruiting legal professionals and students to give interactive classes in schools. They also aim to create a website where the public will be able to access reliable and easy to understand information.

Anna Martinez, Nina Pusic, and Andrea Scarpello (all studying the LLM Global Environment and Climate Change Law) form the team ‘Thinking Global, Acting Local’ and aim to use “their unique and diverse skills to mitigate the devastating impacts of climate change”. The three students, who hail from Gibraltar, Croatia, and Italy, said: “We wanted to start local, right here at the University of Edinburgh, which can have global positive impacts, through streamlining more institutional options for Environmental, Sustainable and Climate Change learning within courses throughout all disciplines for undergraduate students.

“Currently non-environmental courses within all Schools at the University do not include material to prepare their undergraduates for actively tackling environmental issues, specifically climate change. Tackling such issues requires robust interdisciplinary work, and the University must provide options to train its students across all its disciplines on how to tackle emissions reductions within their future careers, and the focus on young people is imperative. Therefore, we are working on engaging with all Schools within the University of Edinburgh to ensure every undergraduate student has the capacity to study climate change, regardless of their course.”