Meeting in Copenhagen, May 18, 2013, Agenda and Group Picture

Agenda for the Meeting in Copenhagen, May 18th 2013

Meeting hosted by CePI -  www.cepi.dk

1.      Morning session at The City Hall of Copenhagen

-          Introduction to CePI by Irina Papazu and Cecilie Brøndum Boesen, members of CePI’s board

-          Introduction to the legal and political framework of integration in the City of Copenhagen
by Neil Stenbæk Bloem, member of the City Counsel of Copenhagen and member of CePI.

2.      Walking tour from the City hall to the immigrant district Nørrebro

-          Nørrebro, the most multicultural part of the city with a large concentration of immigrants and also the place where CePI has been active since 2008.

3.      Project Monitoring Workshop

-          Sharing best practices

-          Discussing the final publication with success stories

- Planning of dissemination activities and final project report 

4.      Introduction to CePIs legal advise project on location - walkting tour of Hothers plads and Mjølners Parken, Nørrebro

-          Introduction to CePIs best practice inspired by the Grundtvig project

-          Short walking tour of one of Copenhagens most marginalized areas

Dinner at a middle-eastern café at Nørrebrogade

Participants of the meeting during the walking tour at  Nørrebro

The agenda for the Grundtvig meeting in Iceland Saturday June 8.

  

The meeting will be held in the meeting room downstairs at Túngata 14, (the door on the left at the main entrance).

9.45                Welcome

10.00              Discussion of the final booklet and  oral project evaluation
                       Anne Stalfort and Lisa Wintersteiger

11.00              Visit to Reykjavík City Hall, Human Rights Office, best practice, promotion
                       of the Reykjavík City Human Rights Policy and peer education in schools

12.30              Lunch, served in meeting room in Túngata 14

14.00             Presentation of the Icelandic Human Rights Centre
                      A short input of the Women’s Counselling

16.00             End of meeting

18.00            Optional dinner in town (restaurant Við tjörnina, Templarasund 3)

Meeting in Reykjavík, June 8 2013

The event in Reykjavík will take place in just a little more than a week so I guess you all want to get some practical information about it.

The meeting will take place on the 8^th of June, starting at 10am and ending at approximately 4pm.
 Lunch and coffee breaks will be provided. 
At 6pm we will meet for dinner and enjoy Icelandic seafood together in one of the best seafood restaurants in Reykjavík, Við Tjörnina. The restaurant is in walking distance from the meeting place in the centre of Reykjavík.

We are looking forward to informing you about what our organisation is all about. The Icelandic Human Rights Centre works with various educational tools, including legal counselling, presentations and courses. During the meeting we will give you an insight in to those tools and their function. Speakers from the Human Rights Centre of Reykjavík and the Women's Counselling will also be joining us for an introduction on their work.

I hope all of you have found satisfactory accommodation and plane tickets.  The meeting will take place at the Human Rights Centre on Túngata 14, 101 Reykjavík. It is quiet central and easy to find. I have attached a map below to facilitate your search.

As the event gets closer we will send you a precise schedule of the meeting. Until then, if you have any questions you can always reach us by mail (halla@humanrights.is).

See you in June!
Halla

Sýna stærra kort http://goo.gl/maps/1zyv9

The Meeting in Copenhagen

Time is moving fast and the meeting in Copenhagen is now in less than two weeks. We are looking forward to hosting the meeting and showing you guys what CePI is all about.

The meeting will consist of three events, which hopefully will give a consistent understanding of what our organisation is currently all about – which processes working with integration in Denmark works and which do not work – an insight into our best practises.

CePI consists of three different components, namely: Political debate, project work and legal counselling, all of which are important in forming that profile, which displays both the way we believe working with problems concerning integration in Denmark makes most sense and, thus, our best practice.

Hence, the sunny Saturday in Copenhagen will present you with these three components and with insight into how we make them work – and importantly, how we make them work in a purely voluntary organisation. And of course we have made time for a discussion of our best practises.       

For practical information, as promised at the meeting in Budapest, we have created the following event on facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/events/450854735006188/?context=create#

The event will be open from Monday the 13^th and closed as soon as every organisation is present. We believe that the event might make it easier to coincide and make plans for the 17^th and possible on the 19^th too, if you guys are up for it.

We hope you have all found hotels and plane tickets of your pleasing. And we hope your trip here will be delightful.

You can always reach us on mail: cepi@cepi.dk and eventually on a phone number we will send you on a later date as well as a precise schedule of the 18^th.

For now, all the best,

// CePI             

Law clinics

Dear all,

Reading through my daily newspaper a couple of days ago, I came across an interesting and inspiring article in Sueddeutsche Zeitung (one of the major German national newspapers) about the increasing number of law clinics at German universities – in my view an excellent tool to improve both, the legal education of students as well as the legal education of people struggling with legal problems in their every day life. The idea is simple: university students – still preparing for their exams – get trained to provide non-profit legal counselling to people not having the financial means and/or not disposing of the necessary know-how to defend their legal position such as asylum seekers, welfare recipients, consumers, lessees etc. In order to guarantee the necessary quality of the counselling the students get trained by professors and practitioners and are often obliged to do legal traineeships in their respective field of counselling during the semester breaks. While law clinics are already well-established in common law countries (the concept has been invented in the United States) in Germany their installation has not been possible before the enactment of the Rechtsdienstleistungsgesetz (Legal services act) in 2008 which pre-empted the exclusive right of German lawyers to provide for legal counselling.

Unfortunately, all of the German web pages I have found so far are only available in German (see e.g.: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/bildung/rechtsberatung-von-jurastudenten-nachwuchs-anwaelte-der-armen-1.1637905; http://www.recht.uni-giessen.de/wps/fb01/home/rlc; http://www.law-school.de/lawclinic.html; http://lawclinic.rewi.hu-berlin.de/clc), but maybe you have equivalent systems in your countries or feel inspired to foster a similar project at your hometown university…

Public Legal Education, Legal Literacy and the Capability Approach

Interview with Lisa Wintersteiger,  Director of Policy at Law for Life - The Foundation for Public Legal Education

Law for Life helped initiate a European network in the field of public legal education. This emerging discipline is also called “legal literacy” which points out the importance of legal skills and competences in everyday life.   

How would you define public legal education?

Public legal education describes the range of practices that seek to empower people to deal with the law in their everyday lives. It includes initiatives and activities that build the knowledge, skills and attitudes that people need to cope with common problems that have a legal dimension for example it might be a dispute with their landlord, employment issues or difficulties with a public authority. Public legal education can come in all shapes and sizes –information campaigns harnessing mass media, popular theatre, workshops and DVDs, or classroom learning and much more. 

1. What are the links between public legal education, education for democratic citizenship and human rights education?

Whilst the focus for public legal education tends to be the most common issues that people encounter in their daily lives - such as civil and social issues, the scope for public legal education also incorporates much wider learning about the links between specific legal rights and obligations and the ways in which they are framed in the context of democratic citizenship. For example, a local group might want to undertake a campaign that includes learning about a particular bit of legislation – such as planning rules, and how to lobby their public officials to influence the law in which the law is working or to change it. Many projects would also consider developing the skills and knowledge needed to make sense of human rights and the ways in which they can be exercised. The key task of effective public legal education is to make sure that it is tailored to the specific legal needs of the audience it is targeting.

2. In your work, you use the capability approach. What is legal capability?

The capability approach draws on the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum in the field of welfare economics that seeks to situate equalities in the functional capabilities that enable people to secure a range of freedoms and choices. We have adapted the approach in the context of public legal education to focus on legal capability – the things that a person needs to be and do when they encounter law-related issues. It provides a handy conceptual model that we use to think about the things that a particular group needs us to deliver – some groups need to build skills, others need more of a focus on in-depth knowledge about an area of law. The emphasis for us is on the personal attributes that really empower people to both make sense of the law and to feel confident to take the practical steps to realise rights entitlements and gain access to justice.

3. Where do you see the main benefits of European cooperation in the field of public legal education?

Public legal education encompasses some very diverse fields of practice, and is often integrated into wider services – for example part of an advocacy project or within a wider learning curriculum. European cooperation in the field allows us to really focus on the specific best practices in public legal education that occur across very heterogeneous fields and then to share what works best. Increasingly European citizens and the many other migrants that make up moving populations experience law-related issues that cross borders – like consumer problems or employment issues. We need to build cross-border cooperation to help people access their rights and understand how the law affects them.

  

4. What needs to be done to make legal literacy a reality in Europe? 

We know there are some very worrying gaps between the legal frameworks that seek to protect legal rights and the realities for those people who need protection. Many people do not know their legal rights and often don’t have the practical skills that are vital to ensure that they can claim entitlements and protection. It isn’t resolved simply by having access to a lawyer either, a lawyer isn’t much good if you don’t identify your problem as a legal one, and you aren’t aware of basic rights that you have. Meaningful access to justice in Europe requires a renewed emphasis and focus on the knowledge and skills that we all need to secure choices and freedoms. That means a diverse and targeted approach to learning opportunities that takes into account life stages - we don’t just need to learn in school!  Partnerships are key; public bodies and civil society groups need to work together to reach those most in need, when it comes to law people need to be able to access independent and high quality sources of learning and information that they can trust.

Best Practice: Public Legal Education through ILGA´s Rainbow Index and Map

Interview with Joël Le Déroff, Senior Policy and Programmes Officer at ILGA Europe,

(European Region of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association)

1. ILGA Europe annually publishes the Rainbow Index and Map, reflecting the national legal human rights situation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) people in Europe. The scaling used in the shows each countries´ legislation and administrative practices protecting or violating fundamental rights of LGBTI persons in 49 European countries. Which steps did it take to develop this tool for public legal education? 

We started publishing such an index and such a map only in 2011. The reason why it took us so much time to realise this tool (ILGA-Europe operates since 1996) is that there is a lot of work behind it. Although it addresses only the legal situation of LGBTI people (as opposed to other social facts relating to discrimination, intolerance, etc.), it requires a lot of effort to find all the necessary information. ILGA-Europe has an important resource in that respect, since we can count with the help of our members (national and local NGOs in most of the European countries). But double checking all the pieces of legislation is not always easy, also because of language barriers. 

Another important element is that the map and the index are tools that we try to improve every year. The 2012 index includes far more criteria (42) than the 2011 version (24). The reason for this is that we are progressively making our information more detailed, and that we developed the capacity to cover more legislative areas, Since 2012 we can count with the parallel development of another tool, our Annual Review, which provides us with more opportunities to collect and check data, as well as to monitor legislative change. 

2. Do you think this map can be used as a best practice and transferred to other areas of human rights? And if so, which ones? 

What we know is that the map is extremely useful in our work, because it provides an illustration of where countries are and what priorities to identify for legal changes. t also helps people learn about human rights issues they are not familiar with, because their country may get a mark they did not expect (e.g. we got questions such as “oh, but we have had marriage equality for gays for a long time now, so why aren’t we in the top countries?” In this case, some people realised that there are also a lot of issues concerning the human rights of trans people, which are not solved with equality legislation for gays and lesbians).

So it is a very good awareness raising tool. The fact it has all the information at the back of the map – the details of how countries match our criteria or not – also helps people read it and learn more about human rights issues. 

However, it is also important to communicate on the limits of the tool. For instance, the fact that it does not measure day-to-day intolerance or violence directed at LGBTI people. Just to give an example, when French people see that “their” mark is lower than the mark of Slovakia or Montenegro, they are surprised and they realise that they still have a lot to do. But if you take the opposite perspective, it is also important that people realise that even with a higher mark, the life of the average gay or lesbian is maybe not better in Budapest or Zagreb than in Paris, and that in any case, it shouldn’t be taken as an evidence that the situation in those countries is satisfactory. Another example: the countries that have the highest marks can be (legitimately) proud. But if you look carefully, you realise that they are still far from the highest possible mark, meaning that there is still a lot to do!

Keeping this precaution in mind, I am sure that this tool could be replicated in a variety of human rights areas, provided you know clearly what you want to measure and how.

3. What do people who could create similar indexes/maps on other areas of human rights need to consider when they define indicators? 

It is extremely important to define precisely your criteria. For instance: if some aspects of human rights protection are ensured by regulations but not in the legislation adopted by the Parliament of the country, do you give a point to that country? If some policies are in place in part of a federal State, but not in others, how do you deal with this situation?

You also need to choose only criteria on which you know you’ll be able to get information from all countries/constituencies.

I also tend to believe that you have to select themes of a real consistence to create such a tool, in order for it to be readable.

One other example of human rights index is the MIPEX index on the situation of migrants in Europe. 

4. How are the Rainbow index and the map disseminated all across Europe? What are the main target groups? 

ILGA-Europe and its members use it a lot in their contacts with the general public (events, publications). We also use it when we engage with decision makers. Actually, the fact it is at the same time accurate and easy-to-read allows us to use it in different contexts, a lot more than many other tools we have.

Now, when we want to convey a more detailed and specific message, in particular to decision-makers, it also needs to be used together with other more specific and detailed tools (policy papers, positions…). It allows you to capture the attention of your audience, and then explain how they can “improve” their record suggesting solutions, proposing reforms, etc. (to sum it up: “this is your mark, and this is how you could improve it”).