RWI, in cooperation with the Vietnamese Institute for Human Rights, recently held a national conference on human rights research and education in Hanoi, Vietnam. We talked to David Eile, Programme Officer at RWI, who was one of the organizers of the event, to find out more.
Why was it important to organize this conference on human rights research and education?
We are carrying out this conference in order to follow-up on the RWI regional research initiative of 2014, when we brought together researchers from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam to work on improving their capacity to carry out research in human rights. That initiative was focused on issues related to research methodology, and we created possibilities for information sharing between countries on research experiences in order to establish deepened contacts and networks between the participants.
All of the participants also carried out individual research projects, which resulted in a number of research papers which were presented at the “The Third International Conference on Human Rights and Peace & Conflict in Southeast Asia 2014,” organized by the Southeast Asia Human Rights Studies Network (SEAHRN).
For this conference we are organized now in Hanoi 13-14 of August, we have invited the participants from Vietnam that took part in the mentioned activities during 2014 to present their individual research papers to national stakeholders in Vietnam. These stakeholders include representatives from the government, the judiciary, academia, and civil society. This way we want to spread the results of the research papers to a wider public in Vietnam, generate debate on important human rights issues, and to create networks and relations between the invited conference participants.
What was the focus of the conference and what did you think about when planning it?
The conference focused on human rights research and education and is organized around the specific human rights projects that the Vietnamese participants worked on during 2014. These topics include how human rights – in the Vietnamese context – relate to criminal law, business, the environment, rule of law and democracy, and to the Universal Periodic Review. In different panels the participants presented on these topics and debated their conclusions and recommendations with the public and invited international and national experts. This then also becomes a way for the participants to put into practice the knowledge and skills that they acquired during 2014.
What has been achieved? And what’s next for these researchers?
The objective of the conference, and the activities that have led up to it, has been to enhance the capacities of the participants to carry out research in human rights that has a high academic standard, and to generate contacts and debate with the wider public in Vietnam.
The next step is to try to publish the research papers in an international scientific journal, and also for the participants to put into practice what they have learned in the future in their roles as academics and researchers at the different universities and institutions where they work.