Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies held, over the period from the 1st through the 7th of August 2005, the twelfth annual training course on human rights for the students of the universities and high institutes at the headquarter of Al-Sa’eed society for development and bringing up.
More than 60 students from a number of Egyptian and Arab Universities with their different faculties such as the faculty of economics and political sciences and students from the faculties of arts, law, commerce and languages with their different departments in the universities of Ein Shams, Cairo, Helwan, Al-Azhar, Asuit and the American University in Cairo, in addition to a number of Arab students (Syrians, Iraqis, Libyans and Sudanese) were enrolled in this course.
Political reform, both regional and local, was chosen as the banner of this course. The program of the training course included 37 lectures, training sessions, roundtables, discussion groups and 5 working groups, in addition to a number of field visits to the institutions and centers working in the field of human rights in Egypt.
The topics tackled by the training course were divided into a number of basic themes; the first of whom focused on the theoretical and legal topics related to surveying the most important principles, concepts, international human rights treaties. The second theme discussed the problematic issues in the mechanism of human rights when employed within the Arabic cultural context, e. g. the freedom of opinion and expression and the freedoms of thought and belief. A separate theme was directed towards covering the issues of women such as the issues of violence, discrimination and political participation, in addition to a group of empirical topics covering and analyzing the human rights mechanism in the Arab world such as Iraq, Sudan and Palestine. This is while the last theme focuses on the political reform in the Arab world related issues through the initiatives for political reform and the Arab position on them and the role of the Civil society in the reform process and its perspective towards the scenarios proposed for reform in the Arab region.
The lectures were given by 37 lecturers from among the intellectuals, university professors, and human rights issues experts who were chosen in a way that takes into consideration their representation to the various political and cultural visions. This is in addition to a number of experts in the field of human rights and development. Moreover, the students themselves participated in organizing and administering the working groups over the period of the course, which discussed the most important urgent issues in the Arab region such as the issue of political reform and democratic transformation, the rights of women, the claims of universalism and specificity, the issue of torture and the rights of refugees.
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