Annual Conference of the Council of Europe's Programme on human rights education for legal professionals (HELP), at its 20th edition, carried out its work on July 4-5, 2024 in Strasbourg.
The event took place under the aegis of the Lithuanian Presidency of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe and brought together delegates of the magistracy schools of the CoE member states, as well as partners of the HELP Programme. The National Institute of Justice of the Republic of Moldova was represented by Ecaterina Popa, Head of the Training and Research Department, focal point HELP, and Olga Marandici, Head of the International Relations Section.
The annual HELP Conference delivered a communication platform on ways of improving training for legal professionals, including, implementation at national level of European standards on human rights and development of cooperation between all relevant national and international institutions. In particular, topics on HELP courses were addressed as tools to enhance EU-CoE cooperation and their impact on the European Judicial Training Strategy, including, integration HELP courses in the national training curricula of law actors, digitalization as support for national authorities in in effectively addressing current training challenges etc.
Within the conference was also held the second meeting of the Regional Network of judicial training institutions in the Eastern Partnership, attended by representatives of the National Institute of Justice. As part of the project „Women's access to justice: implementing Council of Europe’s gender equality and violence against women standards”, third phase of the EU-CoE Good Governance Partnership, the meeting aimed to evaluate the strategic objectives of the Network in order to establish a cross-border legal community, improving the quality of justice through vocational training and promoting gender mainstreaming and women's access to justice.
The HELP programme is the main educational platform of the Council of Europe on human rights for judges, prosecutors and lawyers. In its 20 years of existence, 54 courses have been developed on various human rights topics, being available in 658 versions translated into more than 40 languages. The National Institute of Justice has taken over and adapted to the national legal order 22 e-courses that are provided with the assistance of national HELP certified tutors, on the ILIAS platforms of the NIJ and HELP of the CoE.
