Strengthening Human Rights Defenders In Belize
In recent years, there has been more openness in Belize to address the human rights violations. Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and HRDs have had greater visibility as they reach out to the public, media have reported positive messages on the issues faced by the communities they represent, and institutions within the government and National Assembly have increasingly invited HRDs to discuss issues affecting the community. Numerous communities in Belize still face severe stigma and discrimination at individual, family and community levels, which impedes their access to health and social services and at times negatively impacts their education and employment opportunities. With the Equal Opportunities Bill on the back burner, now more than ever HRDs and CSOs need to align their interventions to push for an Anti-Discrimination Legislation which supports the protection of all in Belize. This project intends to address these gaps.
The project will establish strong linkages between these three dimensions through the following approach:
The project will establish strong linkages between these three dimensions through the following approach:
- In addition to providing broad organisational capacity strengthening to CSOs, and more individualised capacity development for HRDs based on a capacity assessment tool, the project will support greater networking and exchange of experiences between CSOs and with a wider group of HRDs through developing the capacity of Our Circle to act as a centre of excellence for building capacity of other CSOs and HRDs on strategic issues such as leadership, advocacy and strategy and to facilitate networking and mainstreaming of Human Rights (HR) issues within other development issues such as gender and youth etc. Such a network will act as a channel for participation in and monitoring of other project outputs below.
- Supporting HRDs to conduct research on the prevalence of stigma and discrimination in key contexts such as health, education and the workplace in order to raise awareness and also to provide an evidence-base for further programming designed to address stigma and discrimination.
- Supporting both state institutions and HRDs to engage in dialogue to ensure that the concerns of their constituents are addressed in legal and policy reforms, including implementation of new Constitutional protections against discrimination and civil law reforms. Research conducted under the second output above will provide an evidence base for HRDs inputs to these dialogues, together with comparative studies based on international experiences and international human rights norms.