Steps to effective human rights education

The 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to be celebrated on 10 December, is being used in many parts of the world to assess the significant progress that has been made in promoting and protecting the basic rights and freedoms of individuals.

According Louise Arbour, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, human rights education is critical to that progress.

“For a society to develop and nurture a human rights culture, human rights education is fundamental,” she said in a previous Human Rights Day address.

“It is a tool for promoting equality and enhancing people’s participation in decision-making processes within democratic systems. It is an investment in the prevention of human rights abuses and violent conflicts.”

Human rights education initiatives

Human rights education has been increasingly promoted as a key focus of the United Nations, most notably when it declared 1995-2004 the Decade for Human Rights Education.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights also coordinates the World Programme for Human Rights Education, which commenced in 2005 and “seeks to promote a common understanding of the basic principles and methodologies of human rights education.”

Human rights education is also a core function of national human rights institutions, which have a role to educate, inform and support a diverse range of groups in the community.

However, human rights education, especially for adults, is different to other professional training in both its content and goals. Programs are often developed with the goal of supporting participants to be able to take action to promote human rights standards and, ultimately, contribute to social change.

The design and delivery of human rights education programs therefore face unique challenges that require unique and well-conceived solutions.

New research

A research paper by Human Rights Education Associates – ‘Human Rights Training for Adults’ (published in 2007 and now available online) – has examined a range of human rights education programs for adults in order to identify common factors that help deliver successful outcomes.

The paper uses a comparative study of 26 programs – delivered for human rights defenders, police officers, government officials and the general public in 22 countries – and explores issues around program design, implementation, evaluation and follow-up, and makes a number of specific recommendations in each area.

Given the challenges that face human rights education programs, the research paper pays particular attention to the way in which programs are initially planned.

“Many problems that surface in the evaluation reports stem from a failure to successfully address one or more challenges in the design phase,” writes author Katharine Teleki.

The need for clear and achievable training goals, the selection of appropriate participants, using participatory, adult-centred training approaches and linking human rights issues to the local context are some of the key issues discussed in the report.

Based on its review, the report concludes with three major recommendations:

• programs need to more consistently deliver the interactive, experiential and transformative adult education methodologies that they all agree are essential to effective human rights training
• programs need to emphasise comprehensive mechanisms to follow-up with participants after the formal training program is complete
• programs should explore how they might carry out reliable and comprehensive research and documentation of their work, as the HRE field as a whole lacks solid longitudinal evaluation data on the long-term impact of human rights trainings on participants.

‘Human Rights Training for Adults’ is the first in a series of papers to be published by HREA which aims to “foster and disseminate research and evaluation in the practice of human rights education, training and learning.”

Find out more

Human Rights Training for Adults: What 26 Evaluation Studies Say About Design, Implementation and Follow-Up, Katharine Teleki (2007)