Donor: Olof Palme Center
Duration of project: January – December 2005
Belgrade Centre for Human Rights organised the following activities: the annual Training for Trainers Human Rights School in Belgrade in October 2005; five training seminars for participants of the Schools of Human Rights for Future Lecturers from previous years (25-27 April, 28-30 April, 6-8 May, 9-11 May and 16-18 May, respectively); publishing of the 204-paged Collection – New Wave, a collection of the best papers by the alumni of the Training for Trainers School of Human Rights.The five training seminars were attended by college seniors, college graduates and graduate students who had demonstrated ability and interest in taking part in this type of project activity. The participants attended two preparatory meetings in early April, where they received detailed information about the upcoming workshop activities. They voiced their expectations about the workshops and, in agreement with the project Training Board (members: Vojin Dimitrijević, Vesna Petrović, Bojan Đurić) defined the workshop programmes in keeping with their specific interests. Workshops were focussed on economic and social rights, roles of the Council of Europe and the OUN in regulating, promoting and protecting human rights, gender equality, international human rights protection instruments, humanitarian law issues.
Training for Trainers – School of Human Rights as every year had goal to improve the awareness rising with regard to the rule of law and human rights among young people in Serbia and Montenegro. This was achieved by targeting the specific group of young people who will be able to spread the knowledge received in the future by delivering lectures themselves or by raising the rule of law issues in the ordinary course of their work. Comprehensive programme was drafted and implemented taking into consideration our previous experience and numerous inputs received by the previous lectures and participants.
Twenty-six attendants took part in the School, which comprised over 50 lectures, debates, discussions, mock trials, round table sessions and multi-media presentations. This year’s attendants were more actively involved in all forms of work than their predecessors. They had the opportunity to listen to and debate with the most eminent national experts in human rights, international law and international relations and law of international organisations (CoE, OSCE, EU), the judiciary, politics, media, arts. In drafting the programme the special emphasis was placed on the burning issues in Serbia and Montenegro, i.e. necessity to deal with past with regard to the trials for war crimes, discrimination issues, etc. The panel discussion on the experiences of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbia in facing the past was organised. The panel was open to public and was led by Prof. Žarko Puhovski, president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights from Zagreb, Prof. Vojin Dimitrijević, director of the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, Dino Abazović (Sarajevo), prof. Elena Andreevska (University of Tetovo), prof. Bojko Bučar (Ljubljana).
The participants were provided with the various printed and multimedia materials. Most of the attendants expressed interest in writing papers on the elaborated subjects already during the seminar. Immediately after the course, they chose their topics and asked the BCHR to find them mentors for their papers. The BCHR identified the mentors and put them in touch with the attendants; the mentors were found mostly amongst the lecturers at the 2005 School, experts who had taken part in other successful BCHR projects or projects carried out by the networks the BCHR is a member of. In view of the exceptional interest and quality of the latest papers, the Training Board decided to include the best in the publication of the (attached) collection of the best papers Novi talas (New Wave), published in December 2005.
The 204-paged Collection is entitled New Wave to reflect the influence and importance such a publication, written by young experts in various human rights issues, may have in the national expert public. New Wave was publicly promoted and distributed to all major educational institutions and NGOs in the country as soon as it was published. The papers deal with the subjects elaborated during the Training for Trainers – School of Human Rights seminar, with special stress on the topics of the focus groups: role of international and regional organisations in human rights protection, economic and social rights, humanitarian and international criminal law, status of minorities and other vulnerable groups.
