
Meet the instructor and get a glimpse of the course content and its methodology
Explore the fundamental concepts and principles of human rights, trace their evolution across national, regional, and international systems, and identify the roles of duty bearers.
Explore the human rights framework, including inherent rights and their legal and ethical foundations. Learn how states’ obligations and individuals’ duties shape rights codified at national, regional, and international levels.
Clarify the meaning and scope of rights guaranteed in the international bill of rights and your national constitution. Examine the fundamental characteristics and categories of rights.
Explore the universal, inherent, indivisible, and interdependent nature of human rights and the core principle of equality and nondiscrimination, including definitions of discrimination, prohibited grounds, and direct versus indirect forms.
Identify the civil liberties, political, economic and social, and cultural rights guaranteed by the ICCPR and ICESCR. Explore how these categories protect personal freedoms, participation, work, education, culture, and information.
Reflect on your national constitution, exploring directive principles of policy and linkages among rights such as freedom of speech, right to adequate standard of living, and protection from arbitrary detention.
Explore the meaning and scope of rights in the international Bill of Rights and the common principles binding them, and anticipate state obligations in the next lesson.
Explore how international human rights laws create state obligations to enable freedoms like speech, with respect, protect, fulfill duties, nondiscrimination, progressive realisation, and limitations on rights.
The state has three types of obligations to rights: respect, protect, and fulfil, including non-interference, due diligence to prevent violations, and resource allocation for education and health information.
Identify state obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill rights in voting, anti-torture, education, and food security; ensure non-discrimination, information access, investigations, and standards.
Assess the generic obligation to respect, protect, and fulfill as it applies to the right to peaceful assembly and the right to adequate health care.
Explore progressive realization of economic, social, and cultural rights by outlining how states should maximize resources, adopt time-bound targets, formulate laws, monitor progress, and establish grievance mechanisms.
Explore whether your constitution includes fundamental rights and directive principles, and examine state duties toward economic, social, and cultural rights under article 2 part 1.
During public emergencies, states may derogate from some ICCPR obligations to restore peace, using proportionality, legality, and non-discrimination, while upholding non-derogable rights such as life and fair trial.
The state must respect and progressively realize human rights for all, eliminate discrimination, safeguard life, freedom from torture and slavery, and ensure fair trial during arrest and detention.
Analyze a situation from a human rights perspective, identify affected rights and state obligations, map duty bearers, and assess discrimination, breaches, and progressive realization under the law.
Apply a human rights assessment to a case of a community terrorized by a gang. Identify issues, rights involved, including ICCPR article 26, and state duties across steps 1–4.
Identify the aspects to examine when preparing a brief note on a fatal private factory incident within a human rights assessment framework.
Learn the steps to conduct an initial fact-finding for a human rights assessment at a health care center, prompted by patient complaints about doctors' absence.
Examine cases from a human rights perspective to identify gender dimensions and discrimination. Determine when the state is responsible and outline targeted measures to address violations.
Discover strategies for promoting and protecting rights through monitoring state compliance, civil society engagement, fact-finding and documentation, regular reporting to UN bodies, advocacy campaigns, strategic litigation, and human rights education.
Learn to conduct a step-by-step human rights assessment. Cite international human rights law and apply strategies to promote and protect rights.
Are you someone who has an interest in daily news and has noted the worldwide concern for human rights? Have you been following the debates on human rights? Have you wanted to learn about the basics of human rights yourself?
Or, are you a human rights or social activist seeking to strengthen your skills for applying the human rights framework?
If one of these categories describes you, then this course will help you in your quest!
So, what will you get from this course?
Very briefly, the course introduces you to the basic concepts and principles of human rights, the different categories of rights, the notion of State obligations, the basics of applying the human rights framework to issues, and an overview of strategies for promoting and protecting rights.
What will you get in terms of how the course is taught?
The course is taught using the following:
Lectures with lots of examples to help you connect
Questions for reflection
Case studies
Practice exercises based on case studies
Lesson-end quiz
One 60-minute assignment
Each lesson begins with a statement of what you will cover in that lesson and ends with a reinforcement of what you have learned. There are lots of infographics in the course to help understand the complex concepts and what’s more, to make it exciting for you, we have converted each of them to a poster, which you can download at your end.
Similarly, you can download the case studies and practice questions along with the model answers as well!
You can use all the downloadable materials to conduct your own trainings and workshops or as ready reckoners.
What else do you get?
Please remember, this course is a basic course on human rights, hence each component discussed in this course needs further in-depth inquiry and learning. Therefore, it is likely you will have clarifications and questions. Be assured that the instructor will always be around at the discussion forum to assist you further. Simply post your questions and she will respond to them promptly.
Human rights being a very dynamic subject, the instructor will also keep you informed with periodic news, views, materials, and updates through the discussion forum. The aim is to make your journey into learning human rights a truly collaborative one! What’s more, at the discussion forum you are likely to meet human rights enthusiasts and activists from all over the world and be able forge new alliances and friendships!
If all this sounds exciting to you, then get ready to add this course to your cart and make it a part of your knowledge-acquiring journey – ‘knowledge’ that you can put into action for a better world!
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Content and Overview
This course is divided into four lessons:
Lesson 1: Fundamental Concepts and Principles of Rights – In this lesson, you will get to know what we mean when we say, “I HAVE a right” and from where and how these rights have evolved. You will get a close look at systems at the national, regional, and international levels that provide recognition and protection to these rights. You will also understand how “rights holders” and “duty bearers” are defined under the international human rights system.
Lesson 2: Categories of Rights – This lesson will cover the meaning and scope of rights guaranteed in the International Bill of Rights. So, here we will examine the fundamental characteristics of rights, including a discussion on “discrimination.” Finally, you will get a glimpse into the different categories of nights namely – civil liberties, political, economic, social, and cultural rights along with an understanding of the common features that bind them.
Lesson 3: Understanding State Obligations – In this lesson, with the help of a case study and a practice exercise with a model answer, you we will get to examine the content of obligations of States to ‘respect’, ‘protect’, and ‘fulfil’ with regard to any right.
Lesson 4: Applying the Human Rights Framework – In the concluding lesson, you will have the opportunity to learn about how to conduct a human rights assessment. Case studies and practice sessions will help you fortify your learning. Finally, we will wind up reflecting upon strategies for human rights work.