Lakbay Hustisya Foundation, a local legal aid trust fund organization, is planning to offer scholarship grants to law students in exchange for rendering free legal services.
This was bared Sunday by the group's founder, Assistant Majority Leader and Rizal 2nd district Rep. Fidel Nograles.
“We are offering scholarship grants to law students nationwide to encourage them to explore advocacy work, specifically in providing legal aid to indigent Filipinos,” said Nograles, a Harvard-trained lawyer and legal aid advocate.
The Lakbay Hustisya Foundation Legal Aid Scholarship for academic year 2020-2021 is open to all third and fourth year law students in both public and private law schools in the country.
In exchange for the grant, the awardees must render fifty hours of legal aid per semester. In cases where the awardee is required to provide legal aid as an academic requirement by their school, the 50-hour service requirement should be fulfilled separately.
The deadline for application of the grant is on October 31, 2020.
Nograles said the foundation decided to offer scholarship grants to incentivize students who are willing to "go beyond what is required by their own schools to serve their fellow Filipinos.”
“Admittedly, magiging mabigat ang dagdag na responsibilidad para sa mga papasang scholar (this will add a huge responsibility to the would-be scholar. But we believe that the kind of scholars we will attract are exactly those who do not mind putting in the necessary hard work to do something meaningful,” Nograles pointed out.
The Rizal lawmaker has two pending bills that aim to provide marginalized sectors with better access to legal services. One of them, House Bill (HB) No. 4281 or the Public Attorney’s Office Modernization Act of 2019 seeks to broaden the PAO’s mandate to include free legal assistance to complainants or petitioners.
Meanwhile, HB No. 2993 or the Legal Aid Program Act of 2019, would mandate the establishment of legal aid programs in both private and public law schools in the country to augment the services rendered by the PAO and other public offices that offer free legal assistance.
Lakbay Hustisya Foundation primarily advocates for free legal consultations for poor inmates. It also recently expanded its services by providing free legal consultations online.