On 22 October 2020, a Coordination Meeting for the pilot bar associations was held through a videoconferencing platform. This is the fourth such meeting organised by the Council of Europe under the Joint Project on Strengthening the Capacity of Bar Associations and Lawyers on European Human Rights Standards (SCoBAL). The meeting brought together representatives of the pilot bar associations and the Union of Turkish Bar Association (UTBA). The participants of the event exchanged on the monitoring of the Project’s implementation, as well as other related topics and shared their respective experience.
Upon the opening speeches of Mr Sergey Dikman (CoE-Programme Coordinator) and Mr Ünsal Toker (UTBA-Vice President), an informative session was held about the implementation and monitoring of the short-term objectives in the Strategic Action Plan of the Human Right Centers (HRCs) during COVID-19.
Another agenda item was the introduction of online trainings to be provided under the Project. Current situation of the trainings including adaptation of training curriculum to online platform, related online Trainings of Trainers (ToTs), online cascade trainings to be organised and HELP trainings adapted by the Project were addressed at the meeting.
As one of the most prominent outputs of the Project, the development of IT tool was also discussed at the 4th Coordination Meeting. The draft concept study on IT tool was presented by the provider IT Company to the pilot bar associations and the UTBA for their feedback. The IT tool will continue to be developed in line with the proposals.
IT Tool will be developed in order to facilitate the communication among the lawyers working in HRCs. A database for identification of risk areas at national level will be created by recording the particular repetitive violations detected by the HRCs of the bar associations.
