Conference on HRBA in Maghreb region university education

From February 15-18, Casa Árabe’s headquarters in Cordoba will be hosting an international conference on the Human Rights-Based Approach in the Maghreb region’s university education system.

The ABDEM Consortium of Universities –led by the Unesco Chair of Democratic Citizenship and Cultural Freedom at the University of La Rioja– is on the verge of ending an innovative European project financed by the European Union’s TEMPUS Program, with the participation of twelve academic institutions, three of which are European (from Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom) and three from the Maghreb region (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia).

The project, named Approche basée sur les droits de l’homme (ABDEM), is an attempt to support and assist university level education in the Maghreb region to further the use of the Human Rights-Based Approach (HRBA) in university study programs in Law, Social Work, Journalism and Education Sciences, in accordance with the provisions of the United Nations World Program for Human Rights Education, the second phase of which revolves around university-level education.

The introduction of HRBA means ensuring not only change in academic contents and teaching methodologies, but also change in learning environments and the university management and governance model, in a way that guarantees and promotes the rights of all university community members while at the same time encouraging the country’s political, social and economic development.

The project’s third and final stage, the main subject of the international conference which Casa Árabe is hosting in Cordoba, is to design a Master’s degree program for advanced, inter-university, interdisciplinary studies focusing on the implementation of the human rights-based focus when designing and evaluating public policies. The meeting will be held in closed-door sessions from February 15-18, 2017.

Event program