Paper/Proposal Title
Rights in Small Places? Participation, Rights and Power in Northern Ireland
Location
Local Human Rights Movements
Start Date
10-4-2019 8:30 AM
End Date
10-4-2019 10:00 AM
Keywords
Participation, ESC Rights, Power relations, Accountability, Equality
Abstract
That a disconnect exists between ordinary people and the world of human rights academia, NGOs and INGOs and the marginalised communities they are intended to serve is undisputed. As the years preceding and following the financial crash have been characterised by increased economic inequality and concentration of power and influence in the hands of a ever-shrinking coterie of elites, human rights as a tool of change have seemed increasingly legalistic, irrelevant and divorced from the people. A case study will be presented of Belfast based rights organisation (Participation and the Practice of Rights - PPR) set up to develop and test a model of how human rights can be used as tools by marginalised groups to define, campaign and implement international socio-economic rights standards in local settings.
Author/Speaker Biographical Statement(s)
Nicola Browne, Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity, Fellow with Social Change Initiative: Nicola is a Belfast-based human rights lawyer and campaigner with experience across civil and political, and economic, social and cultural rights, and spanning work in an academic setting, an international body and an NGO. She was a founder staff member of internationally acclaimed organisation Participation and the Practice of Rights which pioneered a ground-breaking participative HRBA for use by marginalised communities to realise their socio-economic rights, including a unique human rights indicators and benchmarks methodology. Nicola was selected as an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity at the London School of Economics (cohort 2018/19) and also holds the role of Social Justice Fellow at Social Change Initiative focusing on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights movements and Peace-building.
Included in
Rights in Small Places? Participation, Rights and Power in Northern Ireland
Local Human Rights Movements
That a disconnect exists between ordinary people and the world of human rights academia, NGOs and INGOs and the marginalised communities they are intended to serve is undisputed. As the years preceding and following the financial crash have been characterised by increased economic inequality and concentration of power and influence in the hands of a ever-shrinking coterie of elites, human rights as a tool of change have seemed increasingly legalistic, irrelevant and divorced from the people. A case study will be presented of Belfast based rights organisation (Participation and the Practice of Rights - PPR) set up to develop and test a model of how human rights can be used as tools by marginalised groups to define, campaign and implement international socio-economic rights standards in local settings.
