equal access
Community Legal Aid celebrates Fair Housing Month by expanding efforts in Berkshire County
Community Legal Aid is a nonprofit that offers free legal support to low-income and older Massachusetts residents in Berkshire, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, and Worcester counties. To celebrate Fair Housing Month, it’s using grants from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to expand its legal work around housing into Berkshire County. Peter Beck – who is also the chair of the Williamstown planning board – will be the designated Community Legal Aid attorney working on fair housing out of the organization’s downtown Pittsfield office. Beck discussed the legacy of the 1968 Fair Housing Act and today’s challenges around fair housing with WAMC.
BECK: It guaranteed equal access to housing regardless of your race, your national origin. It also now includes your family status, your gender, which includes gender identity and sexual orientation. But it ensures that landlords, and anyone involved in the housing market, basically in any capacity, can’t discriminate against folks who are looking to access or keep housing based on who they are.
WAMC: How pervasive of a problem is that in Western Massachusetts?
So, it’s pervasive in Western Massachusetts, just like it’s pervasive everywhere. So, it remains a really difficult problem and a really important problem to tackle. Sometimes the different ways in which people discriminate or are discriminated against can change, depending on the time period, depending on the location. Sometimes disability is the category that we see the most discrimination against, or sometimes it’s race or gender. Sometimes it’s more explicit and on its face, and sometimes it’s more subtle. And sometimes folks don’t even know they’re being discriminated against, because they might be told the unit is not available when it actually is, and then someone who is different from them gets the unit when they got rejected discriminated against.
Community Legal Aid
Bar setting up monthly legal aid booths in courts to assist the public
KUALA LUMPUR: The Bar Council has designated the first Wednesday of each month to provide legal aid to the public at courthouses across the peninsula, Malaysian Bar president Karen Cheah said.
“This is to provide the public access to justice,” she said when launching the council’s Legal Aid Day today.
The event, undertaken in collaboration with the judiciary, the Bar Council National Legal Aid Committee and the National Legal Aid Foundation, was officiated by Chief Justice Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat at the Kuala Lumpur court complex.
Elaborating on how legal aid services will be implemented, committee chairman Abdul Fareed Abdul Gafoor said lawyers will be assigned to man booths set up in courts beginning next month.
“Our members will attend to queries from the public, provide advice and, if necessary be, mitigate criminal cases in which an accused pleads guilty,” he told FMT.
Fareed, a former Bar president, said the first of such booths had been set up in the Kuala Lumpur court complex.
“From next month, more booths will be set up in other courts on the peninsula,” he said.
In her speech, Cheah said the importance of legal aid is found in Article 8 of the Federal Constitution, which states that all persons are equal before the law and entitled to the equal protection of the law.
“This applies regardless of a person’s income or resources. Everyone ought to have equal access to justice,” she said.
Cheah will relinquish her post as Bar president on Saturday after having served a two-year term.
She said the council started its first Legal Aid Center in 1980, first in a small village coffee shop and later in a wooden shack in the then fishing village