The 2015 annual Conference of the European Programme for Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (the HELP Programme) will take place on 4-5 June in Strasbourg.
The HELP Network, a peer-to-peer European Human Rights Training Network entrusted with the implementation of paragraph 9.vi of the 2012 Brighton Declaration, is composed of representatives from National Training Institutions for Judges and Prosecutors and Bar Associations of the 47 member states of the Council of Europe. EJTN, as well as the main international associations of judges, prosecutors and lawyers (CCBE, FBE, IAJ, etc - see below) are partners of the Network.
The Conference provides a forum every year for discussions among all members and partners on ways of enhancing training results and concrete implementation at the national level of the European Convention on Human Rights and on how to improve an effective co-operation among all national and international institutions. During the conference, recommendations and guidelines on human rights training methodology will also be discussed.
This year the conference will be focused on inter-professional challenges: “Interactions between legal and other professionals in human rights training”. It is organised under the Council of Europe Chairmanship of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
HELP has already developed and is developing many curricula on subject matters which include inter-professional aspects (e.g. the courses on Asylum and Refugees, Bioethics, Children Rights, Alternative Measures to Detention, et cetera), but further discussion is needed on how to involve other professionals and their expertise in human rights training.
The annual Network Conference also constitutes an important occasion to discuss bi-laterally the co-operation between the Council of Europe HELP Programme and its partner institutions.
Four working groups will discuss various topics which involve interactions between legal and other professionals, including health and bioethics, media, asylum and refugees and the fight against ill-treatment. Participants will identify and exchange inter-professional challenges encountered in daily professional life when dealing with human rights issues; examine shared knowledge, values, responsibilities and concerns for human rights; share good practices of cooperation and increase inter-professional communication; discuss human rights training needs in order to minimise the challenges identified and ensure synergies between legal and other professionals; and propose, whenever relevant, new types of training, involving mixed groups of professionals and identify the competent training institutions concerned.
Participants are invited to log in to the webpage dedicated to the organisation of the Network Conference on the HELP Moodle platform, in order to select the Working group they wish to attend.
Participants are also welcomed to review the Final Report from the 2014 Network Conference for guidance on the previous outcomes of the annual conference.
The working languages of the conference will be English, French and Russian.
The Final Report for the 2015 Network Conference has now been published and all parties are invited to view it here.
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