Human Rights Defenders of the Future – handbook

Within the framework of the YES (Youth Engagement and Sensitisation for Refugee Integration and an Inclusive Hungarian Society) project, we dedicated two and a half years to raising awareness among secondary school students and training local government professionals and teachers.

We summarised the lessons learned from this intensive work with young people and professionals in a new handbook (read the Hungarian version here). The chosen tool of engagement is critical pedagogy, which is described in chapter 1. We continue with four processes for engaging young people. We start with the Young Voices for the Voiceless group, which we called the Youth Council at the beginning of the programme, before the group renamed itself. It was called a council because it gave its opinion on the various activities of our organisation. Our long-term engagement with them is shown by the fact that they have worked with us for a year and a half and in many different ways. Then we will present the eight-month process of the Social Participation Course for activating refugee and immigrant youth. Then we will cover the niche summer camps on human rights for Ukrainian refugee youth and Hungarian students. We conclude with a look at human rights youth mentors. The mentors’ two-month programme has achieved a level of engagement between the social participation course and the Youth Council. With them, we have reached an advanced level of youth engagement, as we have developed their competences as facilitators, mentors, task developers, researchers and presenters. With the mentors, we also combined the key lessons learned from the three other programmes, the Young Voices, the Social Participation Course and the Human Rights Camps, and secured the participation of the most motivated young people we met. After engaging young people, the handbook will continue with the fifth process, which aimed to raise awareness of rights among teachers in different ways. We also consider it important to work with teachers because they will help us to reach more young people with knowledge about human rights protection.

At the end of the book, we include some of the human rights exercises we have developed or adapted.

We hope that our handbook will be a useful resource for students eager to take action, teachers hungry to share human rights knowledge, and other NGOs who also want to involve young people in their work. The handbook is a summary of the lessons learned from the successes and failures of our YES project. It is intended to contribute to enriching the similar work of others.

Read the handbook here.

The project was supported by Terre des hommes in Germany.