An Internship Experience at the Council of Europe
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Written by Eni Mazniku
In my professional life thus far, I have had a few achievements. One of them, on which I want to focus in this article, is the internship at Council of Europe Office in Tirana. It all started during a Moot Court Competition organized by EURALIUS (Consolidation of Justice System, Mission of the European Union in Albania).
I was selected to be one of the representatives of the Faculty of Law at the University of Tirana during the Moot Court. After a successful presentation in that activity, the Council of Europe Mission in Tirana showed interest in the finalists in the competition. After an interview and a selection process, I was appointed as an intern at the CoE Office in Tirana.
On September, 2012, I started working as a legal assistant in the CoE Office. Personally it was an amazing professional and social experience for me. The staff there was really respectful, professional and patient to help me get adapted soon with the rules and the way of working. The main goal of every CoE Office in Europe is to promote human rights and other important core values and that was what everyone in the office used to work for.
A normal working started at 9:00 and finished at 17:30. Every day we used to sit in the morning at the round table in the kitchen, drink coffee and discussed about what we were going to do during the day, shared opinions on several topics related to the Office’s issues. And later the day was full of different activities, roundtables, conferences and other similar event. The office was very often visited by politicians, decision-makers, ambassadors and delegates from CoE Headquarters. So it was an amazing opportunity to get in touch with very notable people who were good contributors in their fields. Those contacts were very important for me and have served a lot during my professional life.