The hope for lasting legal and judicial reform in Cambodia rests with the next generation of legal professionals. Accordingly, a key PRAJ II objective is to improve the quality of legal education at Cambodia’s universities as well as to improve the quality of education offered by Cambodia’s legal professional training schools and their in-service training programs.

Under PRAJ II, EWMI has continued its highly successful and well-publicized annual law student competitions, the Client Counseling Competition and the Mock Trial Competition. The winning university team from PRAJ II’s 2009 Client Counseling Competition reached the semi-finals of the 2009 International Client Counseling Competition in Las Vegas, finishing in the English-language competition ahead of teams from Canada, New Zealand, Finland, Hong Kong and Scotland, among other countries.

EWMI is also expanding the Alternative Dispute Resolution, Ethics, and Introduction to Advocacy classes it helped develop at the Royal University for Law and Economics (RULE) under PRAJ, as well as working to extend the breadth of the existing English-language program at RULE. EWMI is also developing a new land law training program for judges with the Royal Academy for the Judicial Professions. EWMI also has begun discussions with the Bar Association of the Kingdom of Cambodia (BAKC) to explore how PRAJ II might work with BAKC to improve new lawyers’ professional skills by creating a legal aid internship program for lawyers going through their required one year of supervised practice.