Case studies

Participants in small groups work with real or fictional cases that require them to apply human rights standards. Case studies should be based on credible and realistic scenarios that focus on two or three main issues. The scenario for a study can be presented to participants for consideration in its entirety or “fed” to them sequentially as a developing situation (the “evolving hypothetical”) to which they must respond. This method encourages analysis, problem-solving and planning skills, as well as cooperation and team building. Case studies can be used to set up debates, discussion or further research.

Examples:

“A journalist has disappeared!”

For the following case study the leader's/teacher’s discretion is advised. Provide the group with the following details:
A journalist wrote a story in a newspaper that made someone in a high position angry. The next day unidentified people broke into his/her home and took him/her away. He/she was beaten and put in a room alone. No one knows where he/she is. No one has offered to do anything. He/she has been there for months.
This journalist has been deprived of a number of basic rights. Using the Universal Declaration, ask the group to determine which specific articles have been violated.
Ask each club member to draft a letter to the Minister of Justice concerned, mentioning these rights, or an open letter to the journalist. Who else could be of assistance in this case (introducing participants to the role of civil society’s organizations)?

Child soldiers

In some parts of the world, boys and girls, even younger than ten years old, are recruited to serve as soldiers. Often these children are kidnapped and forced into this dangerous work, which can lead to death, maiming and alienation from their home communities and society as a whole. A new Optional Protocol (2000) to the Convention on the Rights of the Child bans the involvement of children in such armed conflict, as does the International Labour Organization’s Convention concerning the Prohibition of the Worst Forms of Child Labour (1999).

Discuss:

• Why would armed forces want to use children in warfare?
• What human rights of these children are being violated?
• Cite particular articles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
• How might being a child soldier affect girls and boys differently?
• If a child manages to survive and return to the home community, what are some difficulties that she or he might face at first? In the short term? In the long term?

Here are some ways in which club members can take action or explore the issue further:

• Find out more about child soldiers in different parts of the world;
• Find out what organizations are working to rehabilitate former child soldiers and offer them support;
• Write letters encouraging the Government to ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child banning the involvement of children in armed conflict.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989)
http://www.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm