Workshop in human rights offered by law students
Translation: Colin Fisher
THE EUROPEAN LAW STUDENTS’ ASSOCIATION (ELSA) has been holding workshops on human rights in secondary schools in the capital area. Arndís Ósk Magnúsdóttir, the executive director of ELSA in Iceland, met with Stúdentablaðið to discuss the effort.
Along with Árndís, Sverrir Páll Einarsson serves as president of ELSA in Iceland, and Kjartan Sveinn Guðmundsson is the director of the educational outreach program. The members of the association also intend to release an educational journal and hold a conference about human rights. ELSA is an international organization, founded in 1981, and ELSA in Iceland was founded in 2018.
Volunteers who want to contribute
“The work is modeled on an international approach,” Árndís says. “ELSA in the mainland is currently going to schools and teaching the students about human rights and the rule of law, and we’ve taken up that thread here in Iceland. We started this in the winter, and it works out that we have a group of law students who are the instructors, we visit the secondary schools during school hours, and we hold interactive lectures.”
“The dream would be to go to all of the secondary schools in the country, but now we’re concentrating on the capital area, and we’re dealing with all grades. We have 10-15 experts in our collective, law students from different places.” The work is not a temporary effort but rather a continuous exercise that will continue in the next years, though every year a new theme is chosen for the workshops (the current year’s theme is “corruption”).
“We’re trying to shine light on the foundational parts of the constitution: the rule of law, democracy, and human rights. To that end, the students get a copy of the human rights section of the constitution and the European Convention of Human Rights. They learn to apply these legal concepts through history and images.”
Peer to peer learning can be more effective
Formal education on human rights inside the school system varies greatly from school to school and teacher to teacher, and ELSA’s volunteers want to make sure that everyone has a satisfactory basic knowledge. “The main curriculum already provides for education on equality in the country’s schools, but it is not clear whether this is actually reaching the students’ ears and hearts,” Arndís says.
“It’s not enough to have legislation about human rights. The legal framework is of little value if there is no general knowledge and awareness of these rights among the public. We need to learn about them and value them, then human rights protections will be better applied. It is our hope that, with this initiative, we can get those protections to work better in that respect.”
“It’s also important that the space should be safe and that the students feel that they have freedom to express themselves honestly and without judgement. This is why we believe that peer to peer learning, where students can encounter these concepts with people of the same age, is a powerful tool in this context. There is not a large age difference between university students and secondary school students, so the balance of power is different and that encourages more trust.”
The teenagers discover a love for justice
“The secondary school students that I have met are often on a path where they are discovering a love for justice inside themselves, and it has been really great to have conversations with them.”
Students are very interested in the workshop but the questions that interest them most are very different from one school to the next, according to Kjartan Sveinn Guðmundsson, the director of the educational outreach program at ELSA.
“What surprises me most is that they have a lot of interest in the big picture,” Arndís says. “They are not just thinking about the practical side, but rather, they are considering the moral foundations behind the concept of human rights and are thinking deeply about them. That is more theoretical and deeper than I had imagined!”