New project on strengthening Human Rights Cities across four European countries

How can cities all over Europe systematize and strengthen a culture of rights? This is the main question in the project RightsCities for which Utrecht University recently received an EU grant. Together with Vienna (Austria), Lund (Sweden), Gdansk and Sopot (Poland), Utrecht will work on promoting civil society organisation’s awareness of, capacity building and implementation of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. In the project, Utrecht municipality and the UU work closely together with Barbara Oomen, Sneh Aurora and Sara Miellet as members of the UU team.

The operationalization of the framework on human rights cities of the EU's Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) will take place via capacity building activities, strengthening frameworks and processes to conduct local assessments together with local stakeholders, academia, citizens; and in taking the first steps to translate the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights into a participatory monitoring mechanism.

Utrecht University will support this process by contributing to these elements, ensuring that bottom up, participatory processes are integrated into this project, facilitating learning and sharing of good practice, and collecting and consolidating information and data from implementation across the cities with a view to developing recommendations which will inform future initiatives leading to a sustainable Human Rights Cities movement within Europe and around the world.

The project will run for 2 years, from July 2024 to July 2026. For more information: B.M.Oomen@uu.nl.