Cambridge, 30 May 2007 -- The first issue of the Research in Human Rights Education Papers Series has appeared. The paper is a comparative study on models of human rights training. "Human Rights Training for Adults: What Twenty-six Evaluation Studies Say About Design, Implementation and Follow-Up" examines trainings for human rights defenders, police officers, government officials and the general public. Among its main recommendations are: 1) programmes need to more consistently deliver the interactive, experiential and transformative adult education methodologies that they all agree are essential to effective human rights training; 2) programmes need to emphasise comprehensive mechanisms to follow-up with participants after the formal training programme is complete; and 3) programmes should explore how they might carry out reliable and comprehensive research and documentation of their work as the HRE field as a whole lacks solid longitudinal evaluation data on the long-term impact of human rights trainings on participants.

Through the Research in Human Rights Education Papers Series HREA hopes to encourage more research on the impact of human rights education and make the results available to practitioners, to academics and to funders. In 2007 and 2008 HREA will publish three more papers, including a study on the impact of a nationwide human rights education curriculum in the framework of the UNESCO Associated Schools Project in Germany and a review of existing theory about human rights education and learning. Read further and download the research paper.