The Centre is an independent academic institution monitoring human rights developments both domestically and worldwide, issuing a monthly Bulletin, as well as organizing conferences.
Helena Bončková and Hubert Smekal presented a paper Czech "Exemption" from the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights - Still with Us at the Czech Foreign Policy Symposium in the Cerninsky Palace in Prague.
The Centre for Human Rights and Democracy is looking for INTERNS to help it organize conferences, manage grant projects and prepare Czech Review of Human Rights and other papers in the academic year 2012/2013. Interns should be interested in one of these topics
Should you be interested, please send your structured CV and brief letter of motivation by October 24, 2012 to hsmekal@fss.muni.cz.
Indicate the word "Internship" and one of the three thematic areas in the subject of the e-mail.
From September 9 to September 12, the Center representatives visited Vienna, where, under the auspicies of the University of Vienna and Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Menschenrechte, the international conference Empower Human Rights! was held. The aim of the conference was to present results of the research project of AHRI (The Association of Human Rights Institutes) and COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) called "The Role of the EU in UN Human Rights Reform". The annual meeting of AHRI and COST members was held on the occasion of the conference and simultaneously also a conference of PhD students took place.
Six Centre representatives (Linda Janků, Miroslav Knob, Václav Krajňanský, Anna Matušinová, Zuzana Melcrová a Hubert Smekal) signed a contract with nongovernmental organization ENAR (European Network Against Racism) regarding authorship of this year's Shadow Report on the State of Racism in the Czech Republic.
The aim of the Shadow Report is to map the state of racism and racial discrimination from the view of a non-profit sector, to describe important changes which occurred during the period and to put them in the national context. Individual country reports are then summarized in the Shadow Report on the State of Racism in the EU. Special theme of this year's report was islamophobia.
Previous Shadow Reports can be found on http://www.enar-eu.org.
Should international observer missions influence fairness of elections?
Could they be considered a tool for promoting democracy or rather a mean of legitimizing government of pseudo democrats?
These and many other questions were answered by three experienced elections observers during a seminar organized by the Centre which was held on April 18 at the Faculty of Social Science, Masaryk University.
Overcrowded lecture hall at the Faculty of Social Science of Masaryk University in Brno experienced contributions and discussions on the topic of Occupy Wall Street on 6th of December 2011. Jana Kovacovska via video streaming from New York expressed impressions directly from area where the demonstrations take place. Afterwards, the phenomenon was analyzed by lawyer Ladislav Vyhnanek (Constitutional court, MU) alongside with economist Vladan Hodulak (FSS MU) and political scientist Ondrej Cisar (FSS MU).