The Council of Europe HELP Program (Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals) is organizing its 2022 annual network conference in Strasbourg and online from 30 June to 1 July 2022. This year, the Council of Europe’s response to the war in ukraine is one of the key themes of the conference.
Why and how to train legal professionals in times of war? Conference participants will discuss this topic with representatives of the National School of Judges of Ukraine, the Center for Training of Prosecutors of Ukraine and the Secondary School of Lawyers of the National Bar Association of Ukraine. Representatives of the Council of Europe will explain the immediate support that the Organization gave to Ukraine. An example of such support is the virtual Asylum/Migration Help e-Desks launched by the HELP program a few days after the start of the war, on March 1, 2022. It aims to help lawyers from the most affected countries who deal with refugees from Ukraine (Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Moldova) to access necessary information, as well as to train legal professionals to deal effectively with cases at the national level.
There are currently over 105,000 users of the Council of Europe HELP e-learning platform, with the top five countries by number of users being Turkey, France, Italy, Spain and Ukraine.
The conference was organized under the auspices of the Irish Chairmanship of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. It was opened by Thomas Byrne TD., the Irish Minister of State for European Affairs; the Director General of Human Rights and Rule of Law of the Council of Europe, Christos Giakoumopoulos; and the Ambassador and Head of the EU Delegation to the Council of Europe Meglena Kuneva. The opening speech was given by the judge Tim Eick of the European Court of Human Rights.
The conference is broadcast in full on line and is open to anyone interested in the work of the Council of Europe’s HELP program and in HELP online course.
