On November 4th some members of Rafto EAC attended RAFTO Symposium 2011 program under the supervision of EAC supervisor Erik at Radisson Blu Hotel Norge, Bergen.
Seminar started at 9am with the welcome speech from Therese Jebsen, Excutive director of the Rafto foundation. In the first session Guest speakers presented their speech. There were three guest speakers. Graeme Reid, Program Director, spoke on the rights of LGBT people in an African context. Annika Rodriguez, International advisor spoke about the Norwegian Organization for LGBT and Monica Mbari spoke on State Sanctioned Violence. The 2011 Rafto prize Laurate Frank Mughisa and his company Pepe Onziema represented Sexual Minorties Uganda, SMUG is a coalition of LGBTI human rights Organizations working to promote the human rights of LGBTI people, or sexual minorities.
Second Session started at 12:00 with the opening remarks from Halvor Saeter, Director Section for Human Rights and Democracy.Then Panel 1 started. ‘Panel 1: the past and the present of Human rights’ was chaired by Tom Porteous, Deputy program director. Five panelists representing five different countries spoke about the human right issues in their respective countries. All five of them were former Rafto awarded people. They were: Malahat Nasibova ( Azerbizan),Shirin Ebadi(Iran)Peter Molnar(Hungary) Souhayr Belhassen (Tunisia) and Mohammed Daddach (Western Sahara).
After a 20 minutes break we headed for Panel 2. ‘Panel 2: Future Human Rights Challenges’ was chaired by Simon Panek, Executive Director, People in Need Foundation. Like in first panel there were five panelists from five different countries. Panel 2 started with Frank Mughisa. Don Raul Vera Lopez (Mexico) Rediya Kadeer (Xinjiang,China), Bulambo Lembelembe (Congo) and Vo Van Ai ,Vietnam were the five panelists representing their respective countries and human rights violation issues in their countries. These five Rafto Laureates spoke very strongly with passion and experiences from their work, what they have been doing and what they want to do.
After the 20 minutes break audiences were given chance to ask questions. Because of limited time there wasn’t any big discussion going around the hall as there was supposed to be.
The seminar ended with closing remarks by Tom Porteous, Simon Panek, Kevin Bales and Antoine Bernard.
All in all seminars was very effective and informative. It really motivated us and made us think about the human rights issue not only from the place of our origin but enabled us to have an open perspective on different issues from different places of the world.
We enjoyed it!