Human Rights Education

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Law related education aims to improve the ability of adult learners to understand and apply elements of law that affect their everyday lives, as well as raising awareness of fundamental rights as core social and civic entitlements.

Knowledge of rights and legal issues empower individuals and communities’ to participate in the democratic process, gain access to public services and demand their fundamental rights. Moreover, law-related education programmes have the potential to re-engage adults in life-long education and enables them to take more control over their lives and careers. Recent European research in the field of Law-related education and wider access to justice issues has highlighted significant gaps in the ability of Europeans to understand their rights and the processes that are available to gain redress.

Although Human Rights Education has a law and rights core, it includes much more and seeks to combine the knowledge, skills and confidence in dealing with law-related issues with citizens empowerment for the purpose of encouraging people to enforce and respect rights, to shape new rights, or to defend them.

Ways to facilitate Human Rights Education

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  • courses to improve access to justice,
  • Empowerment of victims of domestic violence,
  • Law-related simulations
  • Court observer schemes
  • Facilitating knowledge about human and civil rights
  • Connecting the knowledge dimension with citizens empowerment to action for human and civil rights
  • Promoting human and civil rights in the society[1]



How Human Rights Education Addresses Competencies

Although Rights and law are cognitive constructs, learning about, with, and for them addresses skills, knowledge and attitudes. Following the DARE network for Democracy and Human Rights Education in Europe this learning includes:

  • Recognizing the universal character of human rights
  • Respecting democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms and being able to enforce them in public and private life
  • Empowering the individual citizen and groups to make full use of their democratic rights
  • Combatting discrimination, racism, xenophobia and related intolerance
  • Enforcing gender equality
  • Inclusion of persons with disabilities
  • Empowering the individual citizen to actively participate in public life (active citizenship) [2]

 

Human Rights Education and Empowerment for Democracy

Education for democratic citizenship and human rights education are closely inter-related and mutually supportive. They differ in focus and scope rather than in goals and practices.

  • Education for Democratic Citizenship focuses primarily on democratic rights and responsibilities and active participation, in relation to the civic, political, social, economic, legal and cultural spheres of society,
  • Human Rights Education is concerned with the broader spectrum of human rights and fundamental freedoms in every aspect of people’s lives.



Embeddedness in the Society

Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education seek to combine the awareness and knowledge with empowerment to implement these in the society.

On the state level, at the workbenches, in civil-society organizations or in classrooms. This implies, the training ground and the learning field is the society. Therefore, educational measures in these fields need to build cooperation with the society, include the social reality around the classroom or ideally cooperate in activities planned and conducted by non-formal and formal learning providers together. Non- formal EDC work with young people is probably the perfect training field for democracy: close to society developments, close to young peoples ́ everyday life experience, promoting learning on eye-level, backed with pedagogues who are capable to make the difference:

„Non- formal education has the specific strenght to quickly react on challenges and threats to democracy as it is close to societal developments. it is able to identify issues at their grassroots stage and develop educational concepts, long before the debate has made it to the political and subsequent curricular level.“ [3]



Articles, Checklists and Methods

Human Rights Quiz

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Introduce the Human Rights in an insightful and playful way in groups of all ages.


Code of Conduct

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A seminar is an island and we imagine ourselves to be stranded on this island. Now we have to find our own rules.

Democracy Scrabble

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Students brainstorm in a scrabble style on their associations regarding a key word like "democracy". The method is used for getting ideas into an order, to make different attitudes visible and to become clearer about different aspects of a topic.

Democracy Circle

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An introducing method for a discussion under the question: "What does democracy mean for me personally, what is my relation, am I critical or convinced from it?"

What is Democracy?

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Understanding and reflecting democracy by looking on the different major democracy concepts with their different priorities and assumptions.

Hate Speech Bingo

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Learners explore hate speech in their social networks and how they follow patterns and strategies.

Insult ABC

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Our everyday language says a lot about our culture. In this activity, the insults in our cultures are collected to determine which groups are always indirectly attacked by the insults.


 


References

  1. DARE Democracy and Human Rights Education in Europe: Demanding Fundamental Rights: Law Related Education in Adult Learning, Blue Line Edition 2013
  2. DARE Democracy and Human Rights Education in Europe: Antwerp Declaration on Democracy and Human Rights Education in Europe
  3. DARE Democracy and Human Rights Education in Europe: G. Pirker (ed.): EDC for All – Qualifying and Mainstreaming Education for Democratic Citizenship in Europe, Blue Line Edition 2015

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Related:


Toolbox Justnowtoolbox.png

Just Now

A toolbox for teaching Human Rights in the field of youth education

Online


Handbook Uhrights.png

W. Benedek

Understanding Human Rights

A manual on Human Rights Education published by: European Training and Research Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, Graz (AT)

Download