Kateřina Šimonová

It may be surprising to hear but I never aspired to be a lawyer. My dream job was to be a humanitarian aid worker as I assumed it was the only way I could help people who faced hardship and difficult life situations. However, in the end I applied to the law school at the University of West Bohemia. During my studies I worked at a law firm, but all along business law was never my passion. The breaking point was when I traveled to study as an exchange student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It was here that I witnessed for the first time how systemic and grave human rights violations transpire in reality. On my return back to the Czech Republic to finish the last year of my master studies, it was difficult to imagine that I would continue working at the law firm after my life-changing experience in Jordan and Palestine. Therefore, I decided to leave the world of law firms and applied for a internship at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Office. Since then I have dedicated my full attention on the field of human rights. During the following years I worked as a trainee at the International Organization for Migration. Afterwards, I worked at the European Court of Human Rights and eventually as a lawyer at the Organization for Aid to Refugees and as an adviser at the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic. In 2017, I received the Hermann and Marianne Straniak Fellowship and became a fellow researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights in Vienna. This amazing experience, which gave me a unique opportunity to join one of the most prominent human rights research teams in Europe, further assured me to continue pursuing my dream of establishing my own human rights advocacy organization. Due to the incredible financial but also personal support of the Bakala Foundation, I am able to fulfil my childhood dream of studying at Harvard University. Harvard Law School creates not only, as they often say here, the next world leaders but most importantly educates people who can bring a positive change in the world. I hope that one day I will become exactly this person as well.