Tuesday 23 March 2010

Jessup Moot - White and Case International Rounds - Day 2

At 2 pm, the UiTM team faced UCL. They are champions of UK, beating Oxford in the UK national finals. The first applicant from UCL was from Brazil whilst the second applicant was from Canada. Both Hazralika Hamzah and Faez Razak mooted for UiTM in the role of respondents. Hilwa Bustam was the bench counsel.

From the very start, it was apparent that the mooters were not going to be allowed to stick to their script. One of the judges was an 'interventionist' judge and took all the mooters away from their rehearsed scripts. At one stage, Miss Ummi wrote on her note pad that the woman judge here was a 'Mrs Irwin', i.e. judge as 'cruel' as yours truly when it comes to questioning. I have to politely disagree with Miss Ummi on this because the judge concerned made me look like a nice guy as she was 'brutal' in her questioning. It was a great experience for the mooters. I suppose in Malaysia, what she was doing could be described as doing a 'Sri Ram'. Mooters who have appeared before the great Malaysian Court of Appeal judge Gopal Sri Ram will know what I mean. It was a good moot as all the mooters could handle the probing questions put forward by the bench. Hazralika in particular, was very impressive as she has learnt some of the best mooting techniques from Azinuddin and implemented it in the moot against UCL. Just like Zin, she is so much better 'scriptless'.

As soon as the moot was done at around half past four, we rushed back to the MSD residences as the evening rush hour starts at around five. Next up for us tomorrow is a university from the UAE.

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