a human rights based approach
“Human rights are the basic rights and freedoms that belong to every person in the world, from birth until death. They apply regardless of where you are from, what you believe or how you choose to live your life.”
Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2017
Human rights are based on the principle of ‘freedom’; that people should be free and equal to participate as full members of society. Human rights belong to everyone and are the basic freedoms that we have as human beings to empower us to live with dignity, and participate in our communities equally.
Moments of Freedom is a collectively created ‘free space’ that has shifted the women’s perspective of the need to ‘fit’ with the existing community to actively shaping it- the main focus of the project. New perspectives, ideas, innovation are all gifts to a community that the women have in abundance to participate and integrate meaningfully and equally. Our approach to working collectively with the women in supporting them to achieve their aims in the project is about treating each other with dignity and respect.
A human rights based approach creates space for people to empower themselves to claim their rights based on their expertise and knowledge. Using this approach increases the ability and accountability of people, organisations, professionals to be responsible for respecting, protecting and fulfilling rights. This means giving people the opportunity to shape the decisions that impact on their everyday rights.
A Moments of Freedom human rights based approach:
We take steps to ensure people’s rights are at the centre of the approaches we take to inform policy and practice. This is transferred to the work we do with communities. In practice we take a PANEL approach.
Participation: We involve people in the decisions we make as a group, with the wider community and partnerships we work with.
Accountability: Our work with communities monitors how people’s rights are being affected in an everyday context and we create channels for actions and solutions when issues arise. We report on this via our funding networks and feedback to the group and the wider community.
Non-discrimination: All of our work is about ensuring people are treated fairly without discrimination, Syrian women in a new community often face the biggest barriers to realising their rights.
Empowerment: We create safe spaces for people to come together to lead their own agenda for self -empowerment. We fully support people to understand their rights in an everyday context so that they are real, in accessible language and encourage them to link these with relevant policy and practices that affect their lives.
Legality: All of our approaches are grounded in the legal rights set out in domestic and international laws.
More information on human rights and human rights based approaches.