PUBLISHED: MAY 30, 2005

On May 11th and 12th, 2005 within the framework of two Projects, the “Civil Society Support Initiative” (directly funded by USAID) and the “Legal Advisors Support Network” (funded by the Eurasia Foundation), ICNL organized and conducted a 2-day training for the CSSC Legal advisors’ Network covering all 11 CSSCs based in the territory of the Kyrgyz Republic. ICNL plays a key role in supporting the network of legal advisors, whose members offer free legal advice to individuals and organizations interested in NGO issues and help sponsor and lead events in their communities. As in prior training, this event was aimed at increasing the knowledge of lawyers in the sphere of non-for-profit legislation and further developing their professional skills.

This was the first training that involved the cooperation of different Central Asian countries and used the unique training modules developed by the Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan offices. The first day of the training was devoted to a detailed analysis of the legislation regulating certain organizational legal forms of NCOs such as community-based organizations, employers’ associations, political party and others entities. At this session the Network Lawyers demonstrated their analytical skills in discussing the provisions of legislative acts.

On the second day, a new training module on corporate law, developed by the ICNL Kazakhstan team, was used to educate the network legal advisors on the following topics: “Basic terms, notions, and concepts of corporate law”, “Board of Directors and Conflict of Interest Policy”, “Methods of analysis of constitutive documents for NGOs”, “Analysis of typical mistakes in compiling a Charter for Public Associations and examples of Best Practices”, and “Analysis of typical mistakes in compiling a Charter for Public Foundations and Best Practices”. This new training module is extremely useful and necessary because it takes into account the most important action-oriented issues that lawyers face during the preparation of the constitutive documents for the registration of new non-commercial organizations and for providing consultations in helping to resolve internal corporate issues of already existing organizations.

ICNL will continue to conduct such training in all five Central Asian countries and leverage the experience of each office to improve the base knowledge of lawyers throughout the region.