By: Ashley Muza, Junior Programme Officer
On the 11th of July, the 2025 Winter School on Human Rights came to a conclusion. This follows after two intense weeks of human rights interactions on different thematic areas including, recent trends on International Humanitarian law, International and Regional human rights standards, principles and monitoring mechanisms, Economic, social and cultural rights, Gender equality and women’s rights, children’s rights and minority rights. The Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Harare office, in cooperation with its five academic partners in Zimbabwe, Great Zimbabwe University, University of Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe Ezekiel Guti University, Midlands State University and Africa University facilitated the 2025 Winter School on Human Rights. The Winter School took place 30 June- 11 July 2025, where the Zimbabwe Ezekiel Guti University hosted the first week and the Great Zimbabwe University hosted the second week.
The Winter School brought together a total of 23 law students from the current five law schools in Zimbabwe including three other law students from the faculty of law at the University of Zambia. Different lecturers from the participating six law faculties and representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross, Zimbabwe Gender Commission, Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission, Leonard Cheshire Disability Zimbabwe, delivered the lecturers and facilitated the discussions with the students. The students also carried out a Street law exercise where they came up with lesson plans on the different thematic areas that were presented throughout the two weeks, to encourage interest in clinical work for the university based law clinics.
The main objective of the Winter School is to further develop the human rights research related capacities of university students, focusing on strengthening their abilities to understand how human rights standards, principles and values are implemented in practice, in concrete cases. The Winter School falls under the RWI Zimbabwe Human Rights Capacity Development Programme 2024-2026, funded by Sweden.
