Home NEWSHuman Rights Hope Advocates Africa Trains 80 Grassroots Justice Seekers To Monitor, Report Human Rights Abuses

Hope Advocates Africa Trains 80 Grassroots Justice Seekers To Monitor, Report Human Rights Abuses

by Atlantic Chronicles

Participants, facilitators and organisers pose for a family picture with a sign of peace

By Njozdeka Danhatu

Some 80 Cameroonian grassroots justice seekers have been trained by Hope Advocates Africa on how to monitor and Report Human Rights violations in the two Anglophone Regions.

This was during a capacity building training of grassroots justice seekers to prevent, identify, report, and respond to Human Rights violations in conflict affected communities in the Northwest and Southwest Regions of Cameroon.

The one day workshop held on Thursday, April 14 at the Buea Mountain Hotel was done in partnership with the innovations in legal empowerment, NAMATI and funded by COVID-19 Grassroots Justice Fund and the Fund for Global Human Rights.

According to the Executive Director of Hope Advocates Africa, Caryn Dasah, the idea behind the training was motivated by fake information and propaganda on social media which sometimes instil fear into the minds of the people and most of the time, people have found themselves in a situation in which they have to flee because of unverified information.

“It is our duty as civil society organisations working in Cameroon to ensure that these things do not occur,” Caryn Dasah said “This training targets grassroots women, CSOs, CSOs Academia  to teach them on some basic principle on Human Rights and how to monitor and report it”

Ms Dasah is concerned that sometimes, information on social media exposes and endangers people’s lives and traumatises them.

“We need to ensure that whatever information we feed others with, it should be verified information, and the idea should not be to instil fear or threats or harm,” She said.

At the workshop in Mountain Hotel, the participants received talks from Lawyers as well as religious officials to get the various aspects of Human Rights.

One of the participants, Ruth Abunaw, Founder of Invest In People Worldwide said the workshop was timely because during this Anglophone crisis, Human Rights violations and abuses have been exacerbated and most of the people who face these violations are women.

“I believe that this project has come in to educate the community, educate Human Rights and Justice Seekers within our communities and to give them the best approaches on how to handle Human Rights, monitor cases and the right quarters in forwarding their consent,” She said.

Facilitating the programme, Lilia Dibo Eyong – a person with a disability decried that the rights of persons with disability in the Anglophone conflict have been violated and it was high time something was done about it.

“It is high time the community built youths that are determined to fight against the violations of Human Rights and particularly disability rights because disability right is Human Rights,” she said.

At the end of the session, the Executive Director for Hope Advocates Africa said mechanisms have been put in place to ensure the follow up of participants to make good use of the knowledge acquired.

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