African Court to train journalists in human rights reporting
The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR) has rolled out strategic module to create a pool of knowledge-based Editors and Journalists to publicise the mandate of the Court.
The strategy is to protect human rights on the Continent.
It forms part of the African Court’s Communication Strategy to ensure that Information and Communication policy forms part of its comprehensive strategy and must be placed at the heart of its work and not as an add-on to its activities.
The pool would be schooled on the broad framework of the African Union agenda on integration, development and shared values captured in the Agenda 2063 initiative and the African Governance Architecture (AGA).
Within the framework of the strategic module the scores of editors and journalists from Southern, Central, Western and Northern Regions would be trained from September 7 to September 10 in Arusha, Tanzania.
A working document made available to the Ghana News Agency in Accra by Mr Sukhdev Chhatbar, Senior Information and Communication Officer of African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights said the training of editors and journalists would also serve as Training of Trainers (TOT).
The pool of skilful and knowledge-based journalists would be ready to publicise the mandate of the Court within the broad framework of the African Union agenda on integration, development and shared values captured in the Agenda 2063 initiative and the AGA.
It would focus on enhancing professional skills on how to report African Court stories for improved coverage and public awareness; and established a specific pool of journalists tagged as “Champions of AfCHPR’’.
It would help in building a network of professional editors and journalists that promotes the exchange of experience, competition for better quality of work and the development of senior journalists and editors who could act as future mentors for younger journalists interested in the work of the Court.
The joint training of four Regions is a result of a successful pilot training of 18 East African journalists and editors conducted from May 19 to May 22, 2015 in Arusha.
The four joint regional groupings identified for the trainings are: Southern Africa- Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe
Central Africa- Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, DR Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Sao Tome Principe.
Western Africa- Ghana, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivore, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo and Northern Africa- Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Sahrawi Republic and Tunisia.
The African Court document explained that with the rapid growth of International Human Rights in recent years there has been a growing international trend of setting up regional and sub-regional human rights mechanisms such as the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter -American Court of Human Rights.
On the African continent, this trend has resulted into the creation of human rights bodies not only at the sub-regional levels but also at the continental level.
The creation of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (the Court) and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights was part of the international trend.
Source: GNA