belfast

Northern Ireland Human Rights Festival

The Belonging Project is thrilled to be a part of the 2016 Northern Ireland Human Rights Festival.  The festival is an annual event bringing together humanitarian, community, and charitable organisations around Northern Ireland to celebrate and bring attention to human rights matters.

As the NIHRF website explains:

Each year the 10th December is celebrated as Human Rights Day across the world. The date marks the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption and proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. Civil society groups across the world use this date as an opportunity to celebrate and mark the importance of human rights globally.

Every year a diverse range of organisations across Northern Ireland have traditionally held events in the week surrounding this date to mark the occasion and highlight different aspects of human rights as they apply locally and internationally. In 2012 a number of these organisations came together to pool those individual events into a programme of activities promoted together for the first time as the Northern Ireland Human Rights Festival.

The festival is currently administered by the Human Rights Consortium in collaboration with organisations from civic society. The distinct events that make up the festival however, are developed and run by organisations and individuals with an interest in the protection and promotion of human rights. The diversity of events and the range of issues covered as part of the festival are reflective of the universal nature of human rights.

From December 6 to December 12 there will be dozens of events around Northern Ireland open to the public, and most events are free!  The Belonging Project will be featured at Black Box on December 12 as a part of the Refugees Welcome Party.

The Belonging Project; Forum at Queens University Belfast

It was our pleasure to be invited to attend and speak at the Forum at Queens organised by Dr Rosalind Silvester and Professor Margaret Topping

The Belonging Project was discussed by a panel made up by Dr Silvester, Laurence Gibson and Jolena Flett, with questions and discussion from the audience.  We were delighted to hear the music and journey of the NADA multicultural choir who performed songs from different countries and in a variety of languages. See a video of one of their performances here