LESSON
Lesson Learned: Empowerment of Roma to Fight Rights Deprivation
The project allowed the grantee to introduce and test a new methodology for involving youth in the sphere of international advocacy on behalf of the Roma population in Central and Southern Europe, while maintaining its already established role in strategic litigation. The project had an impact on the youth involved. Its longer-term impact is harder to assess, as is the case in most human rights projects. Impact is often the result of a combination of events and actions, legal changes and court judgments, along attitudinal shifts on the part of decision-makers, opinion-leaders, the mass media and the public-at-large.
Project Name
Project Partner
European Roma Rights Centre
Project Description
The project sought to support and empower grassroots Roma organizations in six countries in Central and Southern Europe to advocate for laws, policies and practices to combat racial discrimination, and to promote the application of international human rights standards concerning housing in national legislation. Working with Roma youth activists to lobby policy makers the grantee hoped to strengthen working relationships. A separate project component aimed to raise awareness among the Roma population of using legal means to challenge rights abuses.
By focusing on the themes of anti-discrimination laws and housing and shelter rights, the project emphasized particular spheres where action was urgently required. Targeting Roma youth and young activists, the project sought to address in a practical way the weakness of Roma civil society organizations in undertaking advocacy on behalf of their own people. The litigation component finally was to demonstrate to the Roma people the viability of taking legal action as a means through which the state might be held accountable for its failure to uphold their rights.
Report
Evaluation Date
January 2011
Theme
Country