The “Rights to Childhood” Foundation, in cooperation with the “Young Pedagogue/Social Pedagogue” club at the University of Ruse, organised the COMPASS National Training Course on Human Rights Education “Understanding Human Rights” from 6 to 10 June in Ruse, Bulgaria.

The course gathered 21 participants among them teachers, law and social work students, social mediators, high-school graduates, NGO workers, volunteers, and a university professors. The course hosted also a guest panellist Irina Stoyanova, the director of the local Europe Direct Information Centre and Nikol Parvanova, a member of the Advisory Council on Youth, who joined online to give a welcoming and inspirational speech to participants from the European Youth Centre of Strasbourg.

The thematic areas of the workshops and sessions of the “Understanding Human Rights” were about hate speech/hate crime, gender equality/gender-based violence, social inclusion and the right to education (with a special emphasis on the right to human rights education.

According to participants, the most valuable aspects of the training course were bringing the concept of human rights closer to their realities and equipping them with the required tools and approaches to tackle the general lack of knowledge regarding human rights in their respective fields.

Further steps on promoting the education on human rights were agreed among participants who designed follow up activities to be implemented after the training course.