The Council of Europe’s Youth and Anti-Discrimination Department organise jointly the No Hate Speech training course which aims to strengthen the competences of multipliers and advocates in the youth and Human Rights field to promote the Council of Europe standards and approaches to addressing hate speech, with a specific focus on counter and alternative narratives through human rights education.
The course gathers some 40 multipliers active with young people on combating hate speech, experts working on standards on fighting discrimination and hate speech, and activists using human rights education and counter-narratives for awareness-raising against hate speech. The participants represent various stakeholders in society, notably youth movements, educational organisations, local authorities, equality bodies/ ombuds-offices, and Human Rights NGO’s.
As the situation with the COVID-19 epidemic remains critical across Europe and measures restricting travel and meetings are in place in many countries, the residential training course unfortunately could not take place in Strasbourg. However, the course was transformed into an online learning activity, partially open for other activists and multipliers to take part in some of its online events.
The course now contains 2 more modules for online learning using Moodle (in total there are 5 modules implemented) which focus on definitions of Hate Speech and addressing hate speech. In addition to these activities, the participants will be offered with 3 webinars, some of which are open for other interested multipliers to join:
- Understanding and analysing Hate Speech
- Addressing Hate Speech and Discrimination (also during the COVID-19 pandemic) including an exchange with the ECRI secretariat
- Human Rights Education as a key approach in addressing Hate Speech
Following a workshop week to explore practical ways how to set up projects to address hate speech, the participants will work on proposing activities, actions, advocacy campaigns or other projects that they could implement with their organisations or institutions. In this way, they will act as multipliers and use the resources, standards and approaches of the Council of Europe.
