Human rights can feel technical and abstract, and as such be difficult for both policy makers and the wider public to engage with. The YHRCN has used a variety of strategies to engage with new audiences. These include the interventions on our Activities page, support for events such as York International Women’s Week and York Disability Week, and support for the York Disability Rights Forum.
Three further strategies are discussed below: the PANEL principles; a collaboration with an advertising agency; and cultural events.
The PANEL principles, which originated in the international development sector, are now widely used as a means of communicating legal norms as widely supported and understood principles – participation, accountability, non-discrimination, empowerment and the law. The YHRCN have used these principles with both public authorities and civil society as a means of translating the value-added provided by a human rights-based approach.
An example of this approach in practice, is a set of activities supporting those Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEETs), initiated by the YHRCN’s indicator report and carried forward by the Human Rights and Equalities Board, in which participation by people who were or had been NEET was central to the design of resulting interventions. Read the report here.
A second example is a collaboration between the YHRCN and Plump, a York-based advertising agency, in 2017. This work drew on wider developments and debates about human rights communication, stressing, for example, the need for positive messaging and to be clearer what we are for as well as what we are against. The CATALYST banner is an example of the outputs from this collaboration. Click here to view the banner.
Third, and finally, the YHRCN has hosted cultural events in the city, designed to engage with new audiences and foster debate about human rights issues. Posters for two of our early film festivals can be found here (2017) and here (2015). Further, in 2024-25, the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York hosted the Nigerian rapper, Eedris Abdulkarim, on its Protective Fellowship Scheme. He produced a CD about his experiences in the UK, including this song about York as a Human Rights City. Again, culture proved a hugely effective medium for engaging new audiences.
