New project to strengthen human rights globally through education
The Danish Institute for Human Rights is, with the support of the EU, initiating an innovative education project to develop digital education to promote human rights globally. The EU has contributed with 5 million euro to finance the project ending in 2018.
”We are happy and proud that the EU have seen such a big potential in our project. We think we can lift national human rights institutions with the work which will commence now,” says Jonas Christoffersen, executive director of the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
100 national human rights institutions will benefit
The project targets national human rights institutions in all parts of the world. These are sister organisations to the institute established to promote human rights. They will now be able to receive assistance to fulfil their role within a number of human rights areas.
During the last decade, the number of national human rights institutions has increased and there is now over a 100 institutions globally. The complexity of their assignments is increasing and traditional education channels and methodologies cannot cope with the developments. This is the reason why the Danish Institute for Human Rights is now in the process of developing accessible educational products for these organisations.
Broad and complex
National human rights institutions have broad mandates in areas such as human rights education, monitoring of human rights, economic, social and cultural rights and human rights and business.
”The project is complex and has many actors, but the idea is to assist our sister organisations to improve their ability to fulfil the role, they were established to fulfil,” says the manager of the project, Kristine Yigen. She and a team from the Danish Institute for Human Rights has developed the project together with partners from Asia Pacific Forum (Australia), African Network of NHRIs (Kenya) and European Network of NHRIs (Bruxelles). The Bolivian Ombudsman Institution has also become a partner in the project representing the Americas in the project. The Danish Institute for Human Rights and the four partners will develop learning products which apply modern technology such as for example apps about human rights.
”In this project we need to reach more than 100 different organisations with similar mandates and similar assignments, but spread all over the globe. This is only possible if we use existing modern technologies,” says Kristine Yigen.
The project will also contribute to the development of the global and regional networks of national human rights institutions to enable improved and more efficient secretariats.