Centre for Civic Education (CCE) organized today in Podgorica the first Forum of Human Rights School, focused on Education for human rights and civic activism – how to action?
Forum has gathered 20 former participants of Human Rights School who have, within four working groups, discussed and gave recommendations for improvement of education for human rights and tolerance, social activism, political participation and volunteerism, entrepreneurship and mobility programmes. Forum participants were also presented research findings of CCE “Youth – social decor or social capital?” that show that young people are more and more apathetic, indifferent to social and political activism, and that the social distance of young people towards vulnerable and marginalized groups in society is extremely expressed, especially towards LGBT persons, persons with disabilities, Roma, HIV-positive persons.
Forum is a new initiative of CCE whose objective is to strenghten communication and cooperation with participants of former generations of Human Rights School. During 13 years of duration, Human Rights School has succesfully completed, via 23 generations, more than 800 citizens who are nowadays working in the institutions of system, civil society organisations, media, educational institutions and youth organisations. Objective of the Forum is that this valuable resource of knowledge, information, skills and contacts shall be used for envisaging recommendations and initiatives in order to continuously improve human rights in Montenegro.
Today’s Forum is predecessing a large national conference that will be organized at the end of month and will gather representatives of educational institutions, civil society, media, youth organisations and organisations dealing with human rights, as well as donating communities in order to discuss possible directions of moving towards effective system of education on human rights and civic activism in the light of findings of aforementioned research of CCE.
Recommendations of working groups will be presented at conference to decision makers and creators of policies that are in function of youth development. It is planned to organize the Forum in the future to diferrent topics with diferrent target groups of participants of Human Rights School.
Svetlana Pešić, programme associate