Human Rights Advanced Leadership Training
Central and Eastern Europe and the Newly Independent States
​

 WLDI launched the Advanced Human Rights Leadership Training  program for women in Central and Eastern Europe and the Confederation  of Independent States in 1998  with the support of the Soros Foundation  (Open Society  Institute). Its Network Women's Program was the vehicle for collaboration and financial support for program.
Anastasia Posadskaya, head of the newly formed program, recognized that in the period following the fall of the Soviet Union, the situation of women in post-socialist countries was characterized by a deterioration of status and violation of rights, including “a predominance of poor and unemployed women, increased violence against women, heightened sexism in the mass media and culture, discrimination against women in the realms of economics and education, as well as more than 20 military conflicts in the region, which took a horrifying, gender-specific toll on women.” *
She also recognized how the concerns of these women were left out of the deliberations at the Women’s Conference in Beijing and its premier document, the Beijing Platform for Action. ​From my own experience, it was clear that the women of the region had not been part of the preparatory process for the 1995 UN Women's Conference. I had given a presentation in early 1995 to leaders of the women's movement in Russia explaining what the UN Women's Conference and the NGO Forum were all about. These leaders were amazed to learn this, as they had no idea about the workings of the UN or how NGO's could make their concerns known.  As Posadskaya noted "the new NGO's did not have the training they needed to translate their experience into the language of the international document."*  By the time of the Conference in Beijing a group of women from Bulgaria, Russia, Poland and Ukraine had drafted a "Statement from a Non-Region," highlighting their situation of invisibility, lack of resources and disempowerment.
The 1997 publication of the human rights manual, Women’s Human Rights Step by Step reinforced OSI’s belief in the probability of women’s empowerment through access to international instruments and mechanisms. This opened up the possibility of collaboration between WLDI and OSI on an unprecedented capacity building effort among the new women’s movements in the post-socialist counties. After a complicated process of engaging the newly forming Open Society foundations across the region in understanding the content and process of the WLDI training, WLDI was given the go ahead and financial support to implement the program. 
​We added two staff members to work on this project. Emelina Quintillan came on as coordinator and Russian-speaking Galina Venetictova as project assistant. Trainers for the project included  Nancy Flowers, Molly Reilly, Reagan Ralph, Joe Eldridge, Martina Vandenberg, Emelina and me. 
​
​The project began with the selection of 4 to 6 participants from 22 countries for a total of 120 participants. The countries included were:

Albania 
Armenia
Azerbaijan 
Belarus 
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Bulgaria 
Croatia, 
​

Czech Republic
Georgia
Kazakhstan 
Kyrgyzstan
Lithuania 
Macedonia 
Mongolia 
Poland​​​

Russia 
Tajikistan 
Turkmenistan
Ukraine 
Uzbekistan
Yugoslavia
Roma Community  in Romania.

The Process
Participants were divided into four groups by country, each of which participated in three one-week training workshops over a period of two years, for a total of 12 week-long training sessions. Several of the sessions took place at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, but others were held in Poland,  Russia,  Bulgaria, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Mongolia. In keeping with program goals and methodology explained on the previous page, the sessions covered core human rights and advocacy content with attention to the particular needs of the region. In the six months between sessions, participants applied the learning by refining and carrying out an actual strategy related to the issue they had identified during the first week.

Language was one of the challenges we faced in the program. The trainers were English speakers and so the participants had to be fairly fluent in English. but some struggled a bit. Because most participants spoke Russian, those who were not fully comfortable in English were assisted by the bilingual English Russian participants. The facilitators, most of whom had experience training groups in international settings, made it a priority to use non-idiomatic English as much as possible. Small group work sessions, composed of country teams, was carried out in their own languages. Following the program, the Step by Step manual was translated into most of the local languages of the region with the support of the Open Society Foundations.

​Components of the Project
​Training Sessions
​Cycle one training concentrated on 

• The human rights system, instruments and mechanisms
• Strategies and the legal system,
• Human rights advocacy
• Developing a strategy

​​Cycle two training covered specific issues being addressed by the advocacy teams.  For example, 

• The workshop in Kazakhstan explored trafficking, political rights, rights education and women's  access to economic resources and social benefits.
• The workshop in Mongolia examined  issues  of labor  rights  and the effects of globalization  on women. 
• The workshop  in Belarus  focused  on violence  against women. 

​Cycle three training focused on evaluation of the advocacy strategies  and analytical  frameworks  for refining  those  strategies  in  progress. 
Implementation of strategies by participants during the interim between sessions.
Technical  assistance  to the advocacy teams was ongoing through electronic  mail, telephone, and fax.  In addition, nine countries received  on-site technical assistance visits to: 

• follow-up  and assess the advocacy  strategies  designed  by the participants during the workshops; 
• help the participants refine their action plan for fund-raising and for effectiveness; and 
• identify the obstacles and potential for making progress in the national contexts of the participants. ​

Documentation and Publication of the Strategies
Each of the teams was required to write a case study of their strategy by describing and analyzing their advocacy experience.  The purpose of this exercise was to encourage organizers of the strategy to reflect, analyze and learn from the experience and, thus, consolidate the learning from the course.

"Becoming and Advocate Step by Step"
The publication of the case studies was the final component of the project. In September 2002, WLDI published the book, Becoming an Advocate Step by Step that contained twelve of the case studies prepared by the participants. 
​The process of writing the case studies and publishing them was regarded as essential to the entire training exercise.  Not only did the writing contribute to solidifying the learning from the program, but it had the potential of making a contribution beyond the program. Documentation of advocacy experiences about women's rights was virtually non-existent in the CEE/CIS  region. This absence served to guarantee the continuing invisibility  of women's efforts across the region to use the human rights system creatively to uphold women's rights. Lack of documentation also created a practical problem for trainers who were forced to rely on advocacy case histories from other parts of the world that may have been less than fully relevant. 
Thus, the exercise of analyzing their experiences in the program allowed participants to contribute to 

• increasing understandings about designing, carrying out and analyzing a strategy among other advocates working on similar issues,
• developing comparative reviews of different experiences to draw out specific themes, challenges, opportunities and recommendations, and 
• making visible the learning that emerged from the collective process of carrying out and evaluating the impact of women's human rights advocacy strategies in order to guide the work and thinking not only of activists, but scholars, donors and policy-makers.

In March 2000, WLDI convened a three-day analytical meeting in Moscow with the key drafter of each of the case studies selected for publication to conduct a final analysis and refinement of the case studies and to draw out regional themes from the participants' advocacy experience. The book was published by September, 2000, in time for the Beijing Plus Five meeting in New York. During that meeting, WLDI convened two panels of case study writers to share their results.

Becoming an Advocate Step by Step

Strategy Case Studies:
Bulgaria:  Strategies Against Domestic Violence
Bulgaria To Make Formal Rights Real
Croatia The Right to Health: Breast Cancer
The Czech Republic Model Legislation on Domestic Violence
Kyrgyzstan Women’s Political Participation
Lithuania Women’s Rights in the Labor Market
Mongolia Remedying Women’s Working Conditions
Poland Protection for Women Victims of Rape
Russia Women’s Rights in the Private Sector
Ukraine Rights Education for Civil Servants
Uzbekistan Women’s Legal Literacy
Yugoslavia Poverty and Violence
​

Context and Challenges
As the papers reveal, women’s rights advocates seeking to use the human rights framework to hold governments account­able to women’s needs and demands in the CEE/NIS region face a number of specific advocacy challenges:

• Not unlike their Western counterparts, addressing women’s rights and bringing a gender perspective to human rights were seen as divisive, and low priority. This approach to human rights did not change appreciably since the collapse of the former regimes— human rights abuses were perceived as gender blind and specific abuses of women’s human rights were not on the agenda of human rights organizations and governments.
• Civil society was barely a decade old and relatively weak.
• Deeply-rooted cultural attitudes and beliefs run counter to basic advocacy concepts such as the idea of challenging the authority of governments or other powerful institutions.
• The entrenched historical pattern of securing basic rights and security through alliances with powerful persons rather than appeal to the rule of law (during the communist period and before), combined with the chaotic, dysfunctional character of legal systems in the post-communist era across the region, makes it diffi­cult to uphold women’s rights by means of traditional legal strategies alone.
• The massive social and economic dislocations of the post-communist decade have impacted women sig­nificantly and differentially, leaving the broad majority of women extremely vulnerable to rights violations.
• The growth of religious and nationalist extremism and the increase in violence and lawlessness in the region is also contributing to women’s increasing vulnerabil­ity to rights violations.

On the other hand it would be a mistake to assume that all the groups faced the same challenges and to the same degree in each of their countries. There were strong contextual differences among the projects. In examining the papers in the book, it is suggested that the success of a project should be judged not by the degree to which the advocates were able to achieve their goals, but by what they were able to accomplish within their par­ticular context and what they learned in the process. In this light, the successes as well as the difficulties recounted here offer valu­able insights and the progress the participants made in such a short period is doubly admirable.

Insights and Lessons
Over the period of the program we were struck by the ease at which concepts that seemed understood at one point could dissolve into confused fragments of information when the context within which they were originally presented changed. This may have been attributable at least in part to the fact that some of the material had been learned in a fragmented manner previously. The papers demonstrate however that the concepts and principles taught in the program became integrated into the strategies and functioned as guides to action to a gratifying de­gree.
 
“Naming” the Human Rights Problem
One of the first and most critical concepts to grasp in human rights advocacy is how to identify a human rights prob­lem. In the program it was quite easy for participants to name social, economic, political and other problems women face in their country, but putting these problems in the human rights framework was another matter. It is essential to learn to do so, however, because until a deeper analysis takes place that demon­strates that a violation of a right exists and that the state has some responsibility with respect to the violation, it will be diffi­cult to use the idea, the arguments and the mechanisms of human rights to achieve the changes desired.
In the cases of Russia and Bulgaria, for example, it was important to begin with the recognition that enforcement mechanisms for women’s rights are essential; yet, their under­standing of the problem and the solution they were able to pro­pose became even stronger when they demonstrated that by fail­ing to provide such mechanisms the state itself was actually con­tributing to the violations or was the cause of violations. In the case of Uzbekistan, it was one thing to say that women are legally illiterate, but their case became more powerful when they recog­nized that legal illiteracy is not just a matter of ignorance on the part of the women, but that it represents a violation of women’s right to information about their rights and that the state has an obligation to remedy the situation.
Naming the Solution and Setting Goals and Strategies
Related to “naming” a human rights problem to be re­solved, a struggle often occurs around the task of deciding what would constitute a solution or remedy. If the problem is lack of enforcement mechanisms, for example, educating women about their rights will not solve the problem— unless accompanied by other initiatives that target enforcement issues directly. Nor would more research about the problem solve it— unless the re­search is used to propose an alternative to the current situation.
It is not surprising that targeting appropriate solutions, goals and strategies would be difficult for advocates. Often, the solution to the problem requires more time, resources and energy than the group might possess at that moment. It is also very tempting for most of us to do what we already know how to do. Nevertheless, one of the most critical skills people can develop is knowing how to make sure the goals set embody a solution to the problem identified, and that the actions and strategies under­taken have the capacity to lead to the achievement of the goal.
Developing the capacity to target the most effective goal and strategy, given the time and resources available is a key chal­lenge to advocates. Almost all advocacy strategies are partial be­cause few have the capacity to move simultaneously in all the directions necessary for success. Moreover success is often cu­mulative. To achieve resolution of a human rights issue through an international mechanism or a constitutional court at the na­tional level might require years of work and therefore be overly intimidating or not be feasible at all. On the other hand submit­ting a shadow report to a committee would be more immediate, but might not get the result needed. What makes an advocacy initiative “strategic,” is having a realistic idea of everything that is needed to achieve the change desired and then to set interim goals and implement strategies that will contribute the most to the overall objective and still provide some immediate satisfac­tion. The skill lies in keeping the long-term and the short-term perspective in dialogue and in balance.
The papers in this book reflect the struggle of the advo­cates to figure out where to put their energies to achieve their goals, given the important issues they identified as critical and their recognition of the multiple areas in which they needed to work at the same time. A number of the country teams chose to focus on advocacy strategies that incorporate a strong grassroots human rights education component, demonstrating a clear grasp of the role of local women’s empowerment in building a national constituency for women’s human rights. The restricted political contexts prevailing in some of the countries involved in the pro­gram constrained participants to choose as a safe and sustainable approach a focus on building citizen participation rather making an overt challenge to the government. They showed considerable interest in developing greater practical and conceptual under­standing of how to design and coordinate legal literacy and other rights education programs for women. While these initiatives can be very useful, the continued challenge to the advocates who have chosen this path will be to keep rights education and awareness raising strategies in perspective— so that they never forget about state responsibility and seek opportunities to incor­porate actions in their strategies that hold government account­able where required.
Coalition Building and Collaboration
Another of the problems experienced in the program deals with the difficulty women’s NGOs sometimes have in col­laborating together. The tensions resulting from the demands of effective joint action among different groups in each team at times minimized the enthusiasm of the participants for their pro­jects. Yet, this is a challenge they will always have to deal with— because effective human rights advocacy work always involves coalition building and collaborative action. The papers reflect both the struggles involved and the satisfaction advocates experi­ence when they successfully negotiate their way through the “col­laboration challenge.”
Learning to be Evaluative
One of the final lessons the papers in the book demon­strate is how difficult but valuable it is to master the skill of being reflective and evaluative of one’s work. Personal reflectivity gen­erates and reinforces critical learning, yet it was not easy for the program teams to approach writing their strategy case studies from a personal perspective. Some of the early drafts of the pa­pers were more descriptive than analytical and, therefore, missed some of the most important nuances of their achievements. By telling about their work from the perspective of what they learned from experience, the case studies became much richer and more useful. By recounting their struggles as well as their strategies, the program participants offer the reader a more com­plete sense of what women must grapple with to become human rights advocates.
The result of this effort IS Becoming an Advocate Step by Step, a book about both product and process; about the “step by step” learning and the changes effected by “human rights advocacy” on behalf of women in the CEE/NIS region. By telling their own stories about the issues and obstacles they faced as they challenged their governments to respect women’s basic rights in word and deed, the participants from the Advanced Human Rights Leadership Training for Women document their trans­formation from women with concerns about women’s rights into advocates and champions for women’s human rights. We trust these portraits will serve as both an inspiration and an example from which others can learn and further build the women’s hu­man rights movement in this region and around the world.

Outcomes
​I would like to conclude this description of the program with the words of Anastasia Posadskaya of the Open Society Institute commenting on the value of the program:
​ 
As a result of the strategies carried out by participants in the Human Rights Advanced Leadership for Women (HRALTW) program, thousands of women and men in countries in the region were introduced to the concepts of women’s human rights, anti-violence legislation, protection of women against discrimination in the labor market, equal access to health care as well as the protection of the human rights of women-victims of rape and trafficking. In spite of the relatively short time-span of the program, most of the country teams achieved concrete results. These include conducting background research studies, documentation of evidence showing the violation of women’s human rights, waging public campaigns, and holding seminars for governments, trade unions, police and NGOs, etc. In several cases, national legislation and policies were changed. Participants had the unique experience of working with and learning from internationally acknowledged experts in women’s human rights. Many participants created new NGOs promoting women’s human rights and/or strengthened the NGOs where they work. Participation in the HRALTW Program provided the opportunity not only to design and carry out effective national strategies, but also to expand their capacity to participate as equal partners in the international networks advocating for women’s human rights. 

* Anastasia Posadskaya-Venderbeck. Excerpts taken from the Preface to Becoming an Advocate Step by Step, Molly Reilly, Margaret Schuler (eds.), Women, Law and Development International, 2000 

To learn more or read or download the book, click here:
​Becoming an Advocate Step by Step

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