The Council of Europe organised a training course on Human Rights narratives in response to hate speech, gathering representatives from different state institutions, Public Defenders office and civil society organisations. The course took place on 5-7 September.

The course aimed at building the competencies of multipliers communication experts and other interested stakeholders, to use and include human rights narratives into their daily action for countering hate speech. It is based on a set of three tools which help to:

• Analyse hate speech to find the proportional response
• Develop human right-based narratives
• Plan how to effectively communicate their counter or alternative narrative campaigns

The course put in practice the Human Rights Education approaches based on Council of Europe’s resources, especially the We CAN Manual for counter and alternative narratives to combat hate speech, and Bookmarks manual on human rights education to combat hate speech online, as well as, a Toolkit for Human Rights Speech developed in the framework of a joint EU – Council of Europe project on counter-narratives. The course introduced the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers recommendation on combating hate speech CM/Rec(2022)16 which proposes specific measures to be implemented by member states when addressing hate speech through a comprehensive human-rights based approach.

The project “Combating hate speech in Georgia” continues to promote Council of Europe and international standards in the field of promoting equality and non-discrimination and combating hate speech. This project is implemented within the third Phase of the joint programme of the European Union and the Council of Europe “Partnership for Good Governance”.