Teaching Human Rights in Europe: Purposes, Realization and Consequences I

Teaching human rights has been in the United Nations Organization (UN) agenda since it was founded in 1945. The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 is the starting point for the creation for human rights law and human rights education. However, for a long time teaching human rights was not a primary field of action in the UN. In 1994, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a Decade of Human Rights Education (HRE) (1995-2004). With this resolution member states would not only adopt the relevant human rights documents, but also, start educating their population about the rights every human being has simply through their humanity. All over Europe and in the (now) 44 member states of the Council of Europe, new institutional and legal frameworks have increasingly been designed and mobilised both at the international and national levels to foster human rights teaching. The situation of national minorities including the efforts given by a state to combat racism and discrimination and to protect minorities is one relevant area that gives valuable information about the overall level of human rights education in a country. As of yet, there is no comprehensive analysis of the action taken during the UN Decade of Human Rights Education. Nor are there any analysis of the effectiveness and the impact of these various frameworks and instruments. Especially interesting is, then, to focus on the consequences of HRE on the life of the vulnerable: members of ethnic and national minorities.
The overall objective of the project is, first, to critically examine the existing international and national legal frameworks for human rights education through protection of minorities and combating ethnic discrimination. Second, the aim is to identify the governmental and non-governmental actors contributing to human rights education and to analyse their dependency and ties to international instruments and international governmental organizations (IGO). Third, it seeks to examine how these frameworks and instruments affect the life of minorities by analysing how the programs and legal measures are reflected in the self-understanding and self-organization of minority groups. The research will be conducted in six states: Armenia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Slovakia and Spain as the case studies.