Elise Mercier: French, Human Rights Advocacy, and Riding a Bike in Quebec City!

Elise Mercier is completing her Level Justice internship at Avocats Sans Frontieres Canada (ASFC) in Quebec City. 

Elise Michelle Mercier is a very francophone name. But despite my very francophone name, I haven’t spoken very much French since high school, where I took French Immersion in a very Anglophone suburb of Ottawa. Still, with a name like mine, I’ve always kind of been identified as the “French girl.” Because I spoke French fluently when I was younger and because family gatherings always served as a refresher, I was always confident that the language would come back to me pretty quickly. You know, like riding a bike.

That’s why, when I started considering the many excellent internships that Level offered, a summer working for Avocats Sans Frontieres Canada (ASFC) in Quebec City seemed like a great opportunity to both test out my “French is just like riding a bike theory,” while also learning how an NGO comprised primarily of Canadian lawyers advances human rights and access to justice abroad.

Well, it didn’t take much more than my long train ride from Toronto to realize how wrong I was; a language is not like a bike. If you don’t use it, you can lose it. And as I awkwardly stumbled through those first conversations, I was pretty sure I’d lost it. 

One day after work the interns got together at a local Microbrasserie, called La Barberie.

But it turns out that if you tell a group of the kindest co-workers in the world “please only speak to me in french even if you speak English,” they will respect it, and you can improve pretty darn quickly. Alors aujourdh’ui, ça va mieux. Despite a little bit of bilingual stumbling, my experience at ASFC has been great. Everybody in the office is upbeat, funny, and infectiously optimistic that international cooperation, when done right, can lead to positive systemic change.

Working at the headquarters has meant that I’ve conducted legal research supporting advocacy at home as well as various partner projects abroad. So while some of my projects focus on developing specific tools to assist partners abroad (a memo explaining definitions of “femicide” in international and different domestic contexts, for example), others focus on domestic advocacy. Some of the latter projects included drafting a statement to Prime Minister Trudeau regarding Mexican human rights violations in advance of the “three amigos” summit in June and researching Iran’s international human rights obligations in order to support imprisoned Canadian-Iranian Academic Homa Hoodfar.

One Friday most of the ASFC office emptied out for a staff yoga class in the park

One thing that I particularly like about ASFC is that it is always reflecting on best practices and its specific role in broader international development and access to justice initiatives. To help with this reflection and to ensure that ASFC can make better informed policy recommendations to the Canadian government in upcoming conferences, I’ve produced research memos summarizing prominent literature on questions like “what is the normative framework of access to justice in international law?”, “How did “access to justice” come to be included as a goal in the UN Sustainable Development Agenda?”, and “From what context did the phrase “legal empowerment” emerge?” 

Outside of work, living in Quebec has been wonderful. I’m quickly becoming a one woman “Travel Quebec” advertisement to my friends. Between the beautiful cobblestone streets, experiencing St Jean Baptiste day on the Plaines d’Abraham, the great shows at the Festival d’Été and weekend visits to Montreal, wineries on L’Isle D’Orleans and whale watching in Tadoussac, I don’t think I could have chosen a better place to reconnect with my Quebecois roots.