Photo: Arturo Requesens-Galnares, Pradeep Wagle, Priska Fleischlin, Rory Truell. Missing in the photo is Rin Kim Jung (Co-facilitator), OHCHR
Over the last weeks, the IFSW UN, Education, Ethics and Indigenous Commissions collaborated with The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to run a Course for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for social workers. The aims of the course included supporting social work practitioners on how to contact and work with UN agencies, understanding UN conventions and how for example, to request a UN Special Rapporteur visit their country to investigate human rights abuses. The OHCHR also gained opportunities to hear ground-up narratives from the social work perspective.
The course co-facilitator and IFSW Global UN Commissioner, Priska Fleischlin said, ‘This is one of a number of ongoing strategies to link social work practice with the UN agencies. It is vitally important that we achieve this as together, the UN from the top-down and social work from the bottom-up can pressure governments to honor the UN declarations they have signed’.
The course which was offered free online ran from the 24th of April until the 8th of May. Topics covered included: ‘The human rights framework and its relevance to social work’; ‘understanding the UN human rights mechanisms and using them for the benefit of people we support’, and ‘putting our knowledge and expertise in practice’ and ‘ the UN Declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples and social work.
The course concluded with remarks from Pradeep Wagle on behalf of the OHCHR and Rory Truell for IFSW. They congratulated Priska Fleischlin and the other IFSW commissioners for the mutual learning that took place. They agreed that IFSW would support the OHCHR by provided community level narratives of human rights abuses and how these have been addressed which Mr Arturo Requesens-Galnares said would be invaluable for the UN agency. Further Mr Wagle happily accepted Rory Truell’s invitation for the OHCHR to assist a new commission that is being established by IFSW focused on defending social workers rights.