From 24th to 31th of August, 2020, EuropeYou youth workers had the chance to take part in the project “The right is to have rights” (TRTHR), organized by Copernicus NGO. The training course took place in Berlin, Germany and involved 32 youth workers coming from 8 different countries – Germany, Spain, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Italy, Romania, Lithuania and Greece.
The project started with get to know each other games, energizers and a nice afternoon outdoor session when we had an opportunity to start working on the project topic while learning more about each other. In the next days, we were introduced to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, European Convention of Human Rights and we had several workshops dedicated to youth minorities and some elements to consider when talking about them such as diversity in the minority groups, citizenship, numbers, culture and diversity, etc. In national groups, we discovered the main minority groups in our countries, if their rights are more violated, what are the local and national initiatives and places, where people take action to protect human rights of minority and prevent all the violations that are happening.
We also had two role plays; the first was called “asylum application – discrimination against refugees” where we needed to complete a true asylum application form and passed an interview to see if we will be accepted or rejected by the new country, and the second role play were decided by each team. The idea was that through this role play we could express and share the different discrimination cases that happen in our countries such as minority discrimination in the schools, in the workplace, within the restaurant and public spaces. It was very nice activity through which we discovered that being in the place of minority people is not always an easy task.
We had many workshops and debates on minority human rights as well as an opportunity to work together in international groups. We created also slogans for the minority rights raise awareness campaign and learn more about how to advocate for minority human rights. In addition, we had the chance to visit the Topographie des Terrors, that is a symbol of human rights violations of many minorities.
