Resources on human rights education
Read more about setting strategic priorities for human rights education, and create more sustainable and far-reaching results
Guide to a strategic approach to human rights education
The DIHR has developed a range of resources over the years to inspire and guide NHRIs to apply their mandate to work strategically with the promotion of human rights education in their countries. A key resource in that regard is the Guide to a strategic approach to human rights education.
The guide suggests common standards for NHRI work on human rights education. These common standards have been developed on the basis of the direction and framework given to NHRIs in the Paris Principles (1993), as well as on the roles and responsibilities that NHRIs have subsequently been called upon to fulfil as new instruments are adopted. The common standards have been developed with a view to identifying challenges and are based on examples of good practice in work with human rights education across mandate areas.
We hope this guide will provide conceptual clarity on the roles and responsibilities of NHRIs in the field of human rights education. The guide is practical rather than theoretical and therefore contains several hands-on exercises that can be used to facilitate dialogue, debate and reflection among and within NHRIs. Please find a link to the guide here – and watch our introductory video.
Human rights education: What works
Human rights education is increasingly acknowledged as an essential part of building a human rights culture. But does it work? This brief reviews existing literature on human rights education for children, presenting an overview of findings on the outcomes of human rights education.
The Brief is based on a review of academic articles, book chapters and evaluation reports from the period 2000-2020. Methods for measuring human rights education outcomes include quantitative surveys; qualitative interviews, focus groups; observations; and document collection. The studies vary from small-scale ethnographic studies involving a few dozen people to large-scale surveys including 100,000 respondents.
The types of human rights education initiatives studied range from short, one-off initiatives to longer-term or even permanent ones. The studies cover initiatives in Canada, Croatia, Dominican Republic, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Kuwait, Norway, Philippines, Senegal, Turkey, the UK, and USA.