12 January 2012

The Women and ESCR working group of ESCR-Net is pleased to announce that we are formally partnering with the Women’s Human Rights Training Institute coordinated by the Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Network of East West Women. 

Institute is a unique initiative founded in 2004 as a first-of-its-kind programme aimed at building the capacity of young lawyers from Central and Eastern European and the Newly Independent States (CEE/NIS) for litigation on women’s rights issues, including:

► violence against women,

► sexual and reproductive health and rights, and

► employment discrimination.

The WHRTI provides practical skills for development of strategic litigation in the region both at the national and international levels through using regional and universal human rights mechanisms such as the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and the Optional Protocol to CEDAW as well as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Optional Protocol to ICCPR, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and eventually its Optional Protocol.

The overarching objectives of the Institute are to:

► develop successful regional and country level litigation strategies on women’s human rights in CEE/NIS.

► build the capacity of lawyers in CEE/NIS to litigate women’s human rights cases at the national, regional and UN levels.

► provide continuous support and expertise for women’s rights litigation efforts of lawyers in CEE/NIS and seed new women’s rights litigation.

► strengthen the network of lawyers for women’s human rights’ strategic litigation in the region.

For more information, see http://www.institute.bgrf.org/

Rebecca Brown - Deputy Director - International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights