Are you a women’s human rights defender?  Do you want to increase your understanding of women’s human rights, and learn how to use the UN Human Rights system and CEDAW, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, to support your activism?

Join other international activists, scholars, community workers, NGO representatives, lawyers and educators in learning about women’s human rights education and activism at the Women’s Human Rights Education Institute (WHRI), a collaboration between the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education/University of Toronto, and the Fundación Justicia y Género of Costa Rica.

Applications now open for the following 2016 programs:

International Women’s Human Rights Education Institute Intensive

August 8-19, 2016 - Toronto

by Claudia C. Lodia

Soon after the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA), a platform that reflects the consensus to reassert the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) while aiming to implement the Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies, women groups on the ground in the global South, began to increasingly illustrate the practical links between women and economic growth, women and peace, and women and active governance. In the past decade, for instance, there has been significant push with the use of affirmative action in Latin America and South Africa as means toward reaching gender equality in representative politics. Additionally, in relation to international peace and security, the women's movement behind the BPFA spurred the passing of the UNSCR 1325, which formally recognizes the utmost importance of a gendered perspective in achieving and maintaining peace.