On 23 November HELP specialised course roll-out on Key Principles on Bioethics was launched for three more groups of legal and healthcare professionals of Armenia, including the representatives from the Ministry of Health, National Institute of Health as well as medical doctors and other healthcare professionals, lawyers, and advocates.

The HELP specialised course on Key Principles on Bioethics aims at addressing the ethical issues of consent to medical intervention, the right to know one’s health data, matters related to medically assisted procreation, recourse to organ or tissue donation and transplantation, etc. All of them in certain aspects may fall into the scope of application of human rights law.

The main purpose of the course is to assist both legal and medical professionals to understand the key human rights principles in the biomedical field.

The training session was opened by Laurence Lwoff, the Head of the Human Rights and Biomedicine Division of the Council of Europe and Anna Sahakyan, the Project Officer of Council of Europe’s Department of Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (HELP) Armenia and EAP.

Following the general presentation of the Oviedo Convention and its Additional Protocols and the work of the Council of Europe in the field of healthcare and biomedicine, the participants were introduced to the HELP programme and HELP in Armenia, as well as HELP online training platform.

The HELP roll-out will be tutored by Armenian HELP certified tutor Anna Mkrtumyan. Successful participants of these training sessions will receive certificates after completion of the Course.

The HELP roll-out was organised under the framework of the Council of Europe’s Project on ‘‘Protection of Human Rights in Biomedicine’’ in Armenia.