Human Rights Literacy in Service Design and Supply: The easyRights Policy Recommendations

Human rights literacy has been studied and investigated largely in countries experiencing gross and persistent violations of human rights. They often design human rights education programs and other measures to combat human rights violations. Moreover, literacy on human rights has been highlighted as a way of understanding dignity, equality, and freedom as both rights/legal claims and normative values within horizontal and vertical applications. Since human rights emerge from everyday social practice, it is crucial not to limit human rights to education or any specific professional skills, but also to raise awareness and empower each member of society including migrants, institutions, public officials, civil society, and NGOs.

Our analysis aimed at specifically exploring the practices of key actors of the easyRights ecosystems, such as service directors and operators, NGOs, and civil society organisations working directly with immigrants, but also ICT experts. The surveys and interviews allowed us to assess the actors´ understanding of human rights and the ways in which they enact those rights throughout their everyday work: in essence, we gauged the level of human rights literacy in the design and provision of public services to propose easyRights policy recommendations with a specific focus on human rights literacy. The results of the survey confirmed our assumption that human rights literacy is, indeed, a critical challenge in service design and provision. This is even more true when services do have a direct deep impact on citizenship and cascade effects on other services and rights.

Following our analysis, key lessons learnt on human rights literacy have been collected and interpreted in terms of evidence-based policy recommendations.