Human Rights Review of 2018

A review of Human Rights activities over 2018 for our annual report.

During 2018, the ALLIANCE continued to mainstream human rights as a cross-cutting them  across the range of our programmes as well as playing a key role in Scotland’s developing human rights agenda.

Here are just a few examples of where the ALLIANCE has mainstreamed human rights into our policy work:

• Social security;
• Integration;
• Fuel poverty;
• Poverty;
• Scottish Parliament working;
• Suicide Prevention;
• Good Food Nation

The ALLIANCE is an active member of many national groups and initiatives working to promote human rights in Scotland. We are represented on the Reference Group for the First Minister’s Advisory Group on Human Rights Leadership (this link will take you away from our website). Our support for this work also included hosting a consultation event for people to share views on the Advisory Group’s proposals.

We continue to co-convened the Health and Social Care Action Group (this link will take you away from our website) of Scotland’s National Action Plan for Human Rights with NHS Health Scotland; three regular meetings of the group were held in 2018. The ALLIANCE is also a member of the Development Working Group for Scotland’s second National Action Plan for Human Rights.

In our efforts to support further national action on the rights of people living with long term conditions, people with disabilities and unpaid carers, we joined the Scottish Human Rights Commission’s (SHRC) Advisory Group on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

We are also a member of the SHRC’s Human Rights Budgeting Steering Group.  Human rights budgeting is one way of ensuring transparency and accountability in fiscal planning and decision-making. It is also a practical tool to ensure that fairness and equality are central if difficult decisions have to be made and there are competing interests and rights.

The ALLIANCE supported Fife Voluntary Action and partners to deliver two human rights and employability workshops (this link will take you away from our website). The aim was to build on our peer research project and support employability service providers mainstream the rights based PANEL Principles into their bids for the Fife ESiF Challenge Fund 2019-22.

During Declaration Festival (this link will take you away from our website) we hosted a screening of the Resilience documentary on the theme of ACEs and Human Rights. A panel comprised of representatives from Scottish Youth Parliament, Rape Crisis Scotland, Parent Network Scotland, Together and NHS Health Scotland engaged in lively discussion with the audience after the screening.

The ALLIANCE also convened two human rights focused workshops at our 2018 Annual Conference.

Finally, having piloted in-house training on human rights for ALLIANCE staff we are delighted that this will be offered to ALLIANCE members in 2019.

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