Two half-days of HELP (Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals Programme) online Training-of-Trainers (ToT) sessions took place on 14 and 15 February for 30 participants from Turkish universities, bar associations and NGOs. The training was organised within the joint European Union and Council of Europe action “Fostering women’s access to justice in Turkey” and will allow participants to become HELP tutors in Turkey.

The training presented the Council of Europe HELP programme, its methodology, its e-learning platform, and the two HELP courses on Access to Justice for Women and Violence against Women and Domestic Violence.

Certified international and national HELP tutors provided information about the content and methodology and shared their past experiences, lessons learned and good practices in the implementation of these two HELP courses.

Ivana Roagna, tutor of HELP online course on Access to justice for women, stressed the importance of using different tools to engage with participants and to give opportunities to discuss openly from a human perspective of what human rights concepts are and how they relate to our lives. “When we are dealing with human rights, we always have to remember the importance of the victim-centred approach, the importance of respect for dignity and the rights of individuals”, she noted.

This training aimed to prepare future tutors to use available course materials, tools and resources, as well as to enrich and adapt them as needed according to course participants. The feedback received after the training demonstrated that it was a comprehensive, fruitful and well-received training which served its purposes to a great extent. One of the participants noted that “Besides HELP, knowledge and experiences shared were very useful to implement any online training in the field of human rights”.

As a next step, successful participants in the ToT will become certified HELP tutors in Turkey and take a role in delivering HELP courses on “Access to justice for women” and “Violence against women and domestic violence” in bar associations, universities and their respective institutions in the coming months.

The action “Fostering women’s access to justice in Turkey” is being implemented under the joint European Union and Council of Europe programme “Horizontal Facility for the Western Balkans and Turkey 2019-2022”.