1st session of the Human Rights Training 2010 with De Brug

The first training session of the Human Rights Training with members of the De Brug programme, an initiative of Global Human Rights Defence, was completed on Saturday the 27 March 2010.

The day was divided into an internal De Brug meeting in the morning and training on development and human rights in the afternoon. During the morning meeting the new website was presented. The positive feedback of the members was very encouraging. The newspaper planned to be published in June was discussed as well as activities for the International Human Rights Day on 10 December 2010. The future structure of De Brug as a network was also discussed and will be followed up on.

The day continued with a training workshop given by Cornelieke Keizer from EqualInRights, an international non-governmental organisation that initiates, guides, co-ordinates, supports and documents learning processes for bottom-up or upstream realisation of human rights.

She presented the human rights based development approach and how it differs from needs based approaches, highlighting the advantages of the first one. After having explained the specifics of the human rights based development approach, she introduced the panel principles of participation, accountability, equality & non-discrimination and empowerment to the participants of the training. The principles’ links to human rights standards and rights mechanisms were made and examples of those principles were given. In order to apply those principles the participants were provided with three case studies. After working on those in groups the results were presented to all participants and discussed in the big round. The session was closed with a short feedback by the participants who commented that they felt to have gained new input and found the training helpful for the work in their own organisations. In this manner the first successful training session of this year was completed.