The project “Electronic Human Rights Education for Lawyers” provides a unique educational opportunity in the field of international law: graduates learn to perform a comparative legal analysis of national legislation on the basis of generally accepted legal standards. Starting in late 2014, the current cycle of the project opened 9 online courses aimed at deepening the study of the general and specific issues of human rights law and the continued application of acquired knowledge in human rights advocacy.

The feedback from the students plays a key role in organizing the learning process, that in turn allows to continuously assess the progress of the current educational cycle and take timely measures for its improvement. Thus, the meeting of the project team, organized in Vilnius in late June, was devoted to discussion of the current situation in the project, the development of the action plan to optimize the learning process and actions aimed at keeping the connections with alumni.

The project “Electronic Human Rights Education for Lawyers” – a living mechanism, and a multinational team of experts, coordinators, tutors works at its implementation. Owing to this fact, each training cycle in the project is not similar to the previous one – there are changes in the channels of communication, algorithms, conditions for the admission of the participants. Thus, the National Project Coordinator in Ukraine Dariya Svyrydova (left) said that the principle of changing the selection of participants for the third cycle was designed to spread the idea of ​​human rights in the regions and that such approach is already showing results: “This year we have recruited quite a good group. It differs from the previous ones because this year we have focused on the regions and deliberately selected people from those regions, where there are few lawyers who deal with human rights issues. We hope very much that these lawyers will not only become professionals and will provide quality support to victims of human rights violations, but also become bearers of the ideas how important human rights are, and will be telling lawyers in their regions about why this is important and why human rights lawyer is a lawyer of new generation.”

This year there have been some changes in principles of working with courses. According to the academic supervisor of the project, the changes are aimed to increase the effectiveness of the work between tutors and students: “This year, unlike the last one, we open courses gradually, and each course has its own deadline. This is due to the fact that this makes it easier for experts and tutors to know, that the active phase of the course began and they must always be there to respond to messages. The feedback of the tutors is very important in the process. Participants wait for it to understand in which direction should they move, and receiving evaluation or comment from a tutor is one of the aspects.”

At the moment, most of the courses are over. After the summer holidays the participants will still have 2 courses to finish before they can receive graduate diplomas of Human Rights House Network program “International Law in Advocacy” during the final conference in Vilnius. But at this stage, the project team has faced the problem of dropout of some participants during the work on the courses and the risk that not all will become graduates. National Project Coordinator in Russia Evgeniya Adrova (right) explains the dropout of participants with significant work load and intensive course work: “Our main problem at this stage is that a lot of people dropped out. Of course, people do not always fully understand how much time they will have to devote to training. As a rule, our members are human rights defenders, they are known and are employed in high-profile cases, they do large volumes of work. But this is not the kind of learning, where everything can be postponed and prepared on the night before the exam.”

The project team quickly reacted to the difficulties faced by the participants. Due to the large amount of work in the course of this program cycle some changes have already been introduced to the curriculum and the project team planned a series of events aimed at increasing the activity and renewal of communication with those participants who did not manage to deal with courses and assignments .

“Since March, we’ve added on a week break between courses, in the previous two courses we have added an extra week of study time. Also, we have reduced the number of mandatory assignments, and in the end of July we plan to announce “amnesty”, giving the opportunity to fulfill missed assignments and get back to learning. We expect that people will take advantage of this opportunity, because some participants have already thanked us for the actions taken, “- said the training supervisor of the project.

Already working on the third cycle of training, the project team draws conclusions and notes on what could be improved in the next cycle. “We hope that through personal contacts we will be able to bring back the participants, either by meeting or communicating online. We will think about how to hold the admissions in the future more carefully, to increase the spread of information at the beginning, explain to people of the time consumption of the courses during the introductory seminar. Maybe, we will be able to show people the platform and materials before they begin to learn. At this stage, seeing the number of lectures and seminars, people will decide whether they can devote enough time for training, “- said Evgeniya Adrova, National Project Coordinator in Russia.

Thus, the work of the project changes and adapts to the circumstances arising, first of all, in order to create comfortable and efficient work during training. Such an approach can ensure the involvement, motivation and professional growth of lawyers who, through the course of study become carriers of the idea of ​​human rights in their regions.

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Being a part of the Human Rights House Network program “International Law in Advocacy”, the project is a platform for improvement professional knowledge and skills of lawyers in the field of human rights and aims to strengthening civil society in the participating countries. The curriculum of the program has been successfully certified. All courses are focused on the use of the knowledge gained by students in advocacy.   

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