Humanitarian law postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in humanitarian law began with a second-year seminar on the law of the sea and ended up somewhere quite different. We were asked to read the Martens Clause and explain what work it actually does. I found that harder than I expected: a provision that gestures towards principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience seemed either very weak or very important, and I could not decide which. That question stayed with me, and it shaped the rest of my degree.

I took public international law and human rights options wherever I could, and wrote my dissertation on how proportionality in targeting is assessed after the fact. Working through the Additional Protocol I provisions and the ICRC commentaries, I became interested in the gap between a rule addressed to a commander deciding in advance and a tribunal reconstructing that decision years later with fuller information. My reading included the ICRC Customary IHL Study and the Tadic and Galic judgments, and I spent some time with the debate around the ICRC's interpretive guidance on direct participation in hostilities, which I found genuinely unsettled rather than simply contested. My supervisor pushed me to be more precise about the evidential problem, and the rewriting taught me more about legal argument than any of the substantive reading did. I have since kept reading around the subject, most recently on the classification of non-international armed conflicts and on detention outside a state's own territory.

My paralegal work is not humanitarian law, but it has been useful preparation in unglamorous ways. I prepare bundles, take instructions, chase country-of-origin material and draft chronologies for asylum and family reunion matters. I have learned how much depends on the quality of a factual account: dates that do not quite line up, an interview record that compresses two events into one, a document whose provenance cannot be established. Reading the Home Office guidance alongside published country information reports has made me sceptical of how easily general situations are turned into legal categories. That scepticism feels directly relevant to conflict classification, where the same evidence has to carry a great deal of legal weight. The job has also taught me to work to deadlines that are not mine and to write clearly for people who are not lawyers.

Outside work, I volunteer monthly in a charity shop, mostly sorting donations and doing the till, which is sociable and undemanding in a way I appreciate after the week. I also help my grandmother with her post, her appointments and the endless business of proving to organisations that she is who she says she is; this has given me a practical education in how institutions handle people who do not fit their assumptions. My main hobby is hill walking, and I have become slightly obsessive about maps and route planning. It sounds unrelated, but terrain, distance and lines on a map are not neutral things, and reading about how boundaries and zones are drawn in conflict has made me notice how often legal concepts rest on geography.

I want to study humanitarian law at master's level because my undergraduate work left me with a set of questions I am not equipped to answer properly. I would like to take detailed options on the conduct of hostilities, occupation and international criminal law, and to write a longer dissertation, probably on how tribunals reason about information available at the time of an attack. In the longer term I hope to work in refugee or international legal practice, or in the legal team of an organisation doing protection work. Either way, I want a firmer foundation than a single dissertation can give, and the discipline of being taught by people who will disagree with me.