Supporting human rights in the Asia-Pacific

26 September 2006

UNSW is this week hosting 26 human rights advocacy workers from around the Asia-Pacific region who are attending the Diplomacy Training Program’s inaugural course on Human Rights Advocacy and Business.

The course participants, who come from Malawi, Sri Lanka, India, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Australia, are concerned about the increasingly challenging relationship between big business and human rights.

“As public-private partnerships proliferate and governments contract out services, the human rights responsibilities of the companies involved have become pressing questions,” says Patrick Earle, executive director of the Diplomacy Training Program (DTP).

“This event is one of the first opportunities for human rights and community advocates from the Asia-Pacific to come together to explore the challenges of holding corporations accountable, to exchange experiences, and to look at how developments in understanding of human rights at the international level might inform advocacy efforts at the local level.”

Human Rights Advocacy and Business has been organised by the DTP (affiliated with the UNSW Faculty of Law) in conjunction with the Australian Human Rights Centre. This is the first DTP course to be held in UNSW’s new Law building.

For more information on the Diplomacy Training Program go to http://www.dtp.unsw.edu.au/