MCLI's New Human Rights Training Institute
MCLI is planning to initiate a Human Rights Training Institute. The goals of the Institute are to train community people as advocates in the use of human rights law in support of struggles for social justice.
While we are at the beginning stages of planning, we hope to draw in a wide net of participants, including college students, teachers, trade unionists, and activists from every social movement. This is not continuing legal education for lawyers, but rather skill-building for the grassroots.
The certificate issued by the Institute will attest that the participant has learned what rights are guaranteed under international and domestic U.S. law; how international treaties apply to the U.S.and can be used in domestic advocacy; how to report non-compliance to the U.N., and why this process matters. The course will explain how the U.S. lags behind the rest of the world in ratifying treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and it will describe the on-going campaigns for their ratification. The course will not be a one-way “transmission belt” of information.
Participants will share their wealth of experience and contribute to the strategies for application of internationally recognized human rights law to their own local campaigns. Everyone will have the chance to practice debating the issues, and getting comfortable with public speaking. At the end of the course, participants will have a new tool for enforcement of their community’s human rights