PART III 9 DOMESTIC REFERRALS  The mission could develop, with the assistance of local lawyers or legal experts, a basic, country-specific document explaining how to pursue an individual complaint through various domestic means, including both government offices and the judicial system. If the mission receives many complaints on a single type of issue, e.g., housing rights or minority rights, it might consider producing a specialized handout on how to pursue domestically that kind of human rights violation. Developing these kinds of handouts might be undertaken as a small-scale project, perhaps with the assistance of the ODIHR. Another good practice used by some missions for handling individual complaints is to hire a local lawyer on either a full-time or part-time basis to provide basic legal advice to people who approach the mission for assistance. The purpose is not to take up legal cases officially or to represent any individual in court – this would be beyond the scope of virtually all mission mandates – but to have sufficient in-house expertise to make an initial judgement on the legal aspects of a complaint and to provide some initial, useful, legal guidance to the complainant. The lawyer could alert the mission to any serious human rights allegations that come to his or her attention and that might merit further follow-up by the mission. The lawyer could either operate out of the mission or could set aside a certain number of hours each day to deal with referrals from the mission. The mission might also come to a similar agreement with a local legal-aid society. 86