U.N. Human Rights Regional Office for the Middle East and North Africawarmly welcomed this morning participants of the League of Arab States Secretariat to a two-day training on Integrating a Human Rights Perspective into Policies and Programmes. This meeting comes in the context of a strong partnership between U.N. Human Rights and the League of Arab States on promoting human rights and development across the Arab region.
Over the next two days, U.N. Human Rights Regional Office for the Middle East and North Africa will facilitate this training course to strengthen the capacities of the League’s Secretariat on how to effectively integrate a human rights-based approach across its policies and programmes. The training course aims to ensure that human rights standards guide cooperation and programming in all sectors of the Secretariat, and throughout all phases of the programming process.
The training course will explore important foundational principles of a human rights-based approach to programming, including: Universality, Indivisibility, and Interdependence; Accountability;Equality and Non-discrimination; and Participation and Inclusion. This will include the application of the principle of “Leave No One Behind” in order to tailor policies and programmes to strengthen protection and participation of marginalized groups such as the participation of women, as well as youth, children, persons with disabilities, and people on the move. The training course will further guide participants on how to utilizehuman rights data and indicators as important measures in the design, implementation and monitoring of policies and programmes.
Welcoming the ongoing cooperation between U.N. Human Rights and the League of Arab States, Mr. Mounir El-Fassi, Head of the League’s Human Rights Department, stressed the principle of Leave No One Behind, as well as the importance of a human rights-based approach in the design of policies across all fields
In his turn, Mr. Francesco Motta, U.N. Human Rights Chief of OHCHR Asia, Pacific, Middle East and North Africa branch, stressed on the importance of a rights-based approach and praised the important role of the League of Arab States in advancing human rights across the Arab world.
“From the first creation of a Permanent Arab Commission for Human Rights in 1968 to the adoption of the Arab Charter on Human Rights in 2004, the Arab League continues to develop important initiativesto enshrinehuman rights standards across the region,” Motta said. “This includes the Arab vision 2030 towards eradicating multidimensional poverty to support Arab efforts in achieving the 2030 Agenda,as well as many other endeavours such as the education, women and children regional strategies.”
At the outcome of the training course, participantswill be further strengthened in their conceptual and practical understanding of applying a human rights-based approach in the design, conceptualization and operationalization of programmes.
This activityfalls under the remit of cooperation framework between the League of Arab States and the United Nations, based on General Assembly Resolution 67/11 titled "Cooperation between the United Nations and the League of Arab States" (19 October 2012) and General Assembly Resolution 67/169 titled "Enhancement of international cooperation in the field of human rights" (20 December 2012). It further falls within the implementation of the “Memorandum of Intent between the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the League of Arab States” (17 April 2002), identifying areas of cooperation in the field of human rights, including capacity-building for the staff of the League.
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