By Michael Rappaport
Toronto
December 25 2009 issue
(CAAI News Media)
At the annual office Christmas party at Bennett Gastle P.C. in Toronto on Dec. 3, 2007, the lawyers and staff signed a statement of principles that would give rise to the law firm’s commitment to the Cambodian Law Students Project.
Charles Gastle, an international trade lawyer and name partner at the firm and adjunct professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, was struck by the poverty he witnessed while advising the Kingdom of Cambodia’s Ministry of Commerce on competition and intellectual property laws and lecturing on law at the Royal University for Law and Economics (RULE) in the capital city Phnom Penh, three years ago.
At the university Gastle saw students so poor that they slept in a ditch under the school. Still conditions have improved immeasurably since the devastating three-decade long civil war ended in 1991, according to Gastle. During the civil war the Khmer Rouge executed the majority of the country’s lawyers. In 2009, Cambodia only had 538 practising lawyers to serve a population of 14-million people.
Returning to Toronto, Gastle discussed the plight of students in Cambodia with his colleagues at Bennett Gastle. In particular, he bemoaned the lack of opportunity for younger women who were denied the opportunity to obtain a higher education. Gastle and his partner, Elizabeth Bennett-Martin, who practises insurance defence, resolved to create a scholarship program to help young women from rural provinces in Cambodia attend law school. Tan Try, a law student form Cambodia who was completing an internship at Bennett Gastle offered to administer the scholarship program when he returned home.
When Gastle and Bennett-Martin founded Bennett Gastle in June 2005, they were hoping for more control over their lives and work and had no inkling they would be immersed in international charitable ventures. Currently, Bennett Gastle is paying for the complete university education of five girls from rural Cambodia with an additional three students funded by the friends of Bennett Gastle. The young women attend RULE as part of a broader group of 25 female law students sponsored by international donations.
This past autumn, Gastle and Bennett-Martin visited Phnom Penh to meet with some of the students they sponsored. According to Bennett-Martin, one of the students who was raised in a grass hut in a rural province had never been inside a hotel before or ridden an elevator.
The 25 female students at RULE sleep on mats in a residence without furniture and only hot-plates to cook their meals. Gastle and Bennett-Martin bought two computers and software for the students and paid for Internet access.
Each time Gastle visits Cambodia he lugs suitcases filled with legal text books. The organization that Gastle established to support the law school’s library, 'Textbooks for RULE,' has donated over $5,000 worth of textbooks to date. The library’s shelves were practically bare the first time Gastle taught at RULE. 'In Canada many books sit on shelves unused. In Cambodia every book is shared and passed around,' Gastle says.
Gastle says that when he’s at his computer and receives an e-mail from one of the Cambodian
students he sponsors it 'really brightens the day.' For Bennett-Martin helping out students in Cambodia has inspired her to try to do more good work. Currently she is in the process of establishing a non-profit charitable organization, Cambodian Legal Education for Women (C.L.E.W.), whose goal is to support 30 female law students in Cambodia each year.
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