Weekly Human Rights News: 31/05/2024

This summer, we're offering community groups and voluntary sector organisations based in London the chance to join us on a free 2-part, human rights capacity building programme.  

The course consists of 2 half day workshops taking place on Thursday 20th June and Wednesday 17th July from 9.30-12.30 pm. Lunch will be provided following the event. The events will take place at The Abbey Centre, 34 Great Smith Street, London, SW1P 3BU.

A reminder that applications are still open for UK wide community groups to work with BIHR until 19th June. BIHR will be working with 4 community groups from July to December to co-design a human rights support solution that will help groups to tackle injustice they see in their work. Solutions will vary depending on the purpose, context and audience, so community groups can think creatively about what would help them the most! 

Apply now to be a part of our 2024 community support solution.  

Find out more about our work in 2023 here. 

This week, we delivered our final human rights staff capacity building workshop for the Housing Ombudsman Service (HOS). These workshops have been running from January 2024 and throughout these workshops we have seen a notable increase in the confidence and understanding and using human rights amongst HOS staff. It has been a rewarding experience for us to be able to work with HOS to create these workshops. We will be producing an impact report to show the journey of these workshops, however HOS staff had this to say: 

Here is what one participant had to say about human rights after attending our workshop: “More confident. I understand them better and this is the first time any company I have worked for actually providing training surrounding this when handling disputes.” 

Parliament has been dissolved ahead of the upcoming General Election.  

On Wednesday 22nd May, the Prime Minister announced that there would be a General Election on Thursday 4th July. In preparation for this, on Thursday 30th May, Parliament was dissolved – meaning that both the House of Lords and House of Commons stop doing business and all MPs lose their seats in the House of Commons.  

Any Bills (proposed laws) that were not finalised by then have been dropped and it will be up to the new Parliament to decide whether to start them again. 

Find out about how the Human Rights Act protects our right to free elections. 

A Voluntary Sector Manifesto published.  

Over the last year ACEVO and NCVO, two membership bodies for the voluntary sector, have been developing a manifesto about the relationship between government and civil society based on better collaboration. With the announcement of the General Election for the 4 July, the organisations released A Voluntary Sector Manifesto this week. Amongst other things, it calls for a society where we can all speak out, and notes concern about the weakening of human rights laws.  

Read more about the voluntary sector manifesto here.