Weekly Human Rights News: 18-08-23

On Tuesday 15^th August, we held an online launch event to explain how the next phase of our Communities Programme will work. We recently held awareness-raising workshops to help organisations expand their understanding of the Human Rights Act and how to use it in practice. We’re now offering up to five community organisations free support to co-design a human rights solution with us.

Last year, we worked with a women’s centre, a self-advocacy group, an alliance of Scottish children’s charities and a charity for survivors of torture to create guides, Easy Read postcards, Child Impact Assessment tools and template letters.

Community and voluntary groups who want to join the 2023 programme should apply on our website by 5pm on August 29^th and we’ll work together to come up with tools or resources that support their work.

The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) ran a consultation asking if they should change the Care Quality Commission regulations to say people in care homes and hospitals have a right to visitors. We co-produced our response with Lived Experience Experts, explaining that this right exists under the Article 8 right to private and family life and the focus should be on putting the right into practice. We shared our evidence page, Human Rights in Action: The importance of visitors for residents and patients, with DHSC.

In this blog, written for the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (acevo), Sanchita gives her honest reflections on the leadership needed to ensure our universal human rights have meaning in the small places close to home.

"It can feel like human rights are a natural fit, speaking to sector values, to what we want to see in the world. But in reality, are the organisations we lead really knowledgeable and confident about the HRA? Are we able to use the HRA to advocate with and for the people we support, in our service decisions, or our challenges and asks of those with power?"

A family with two disabled children challenged long-term hotel accommodation

Five-year-old Amina and eight-year-old Mohammad fled Sudan with their parents and sought asylum in Belfast. Both children have disabilities that mean they are unable to walk and have particular dietary needs. The Home Office placed the whole family in a single room, where they have been living for 11 months. The family say the children have not had access to food that meets their needs and only received vital medication last month. They have also not been to school since arriving in the UK. They are now being represented by JMS Solicitors, who described the situation as a “complete derogation of the Home Office duties under the Refugee Convention and European Convention on Human Rights”.

Source: Irish News