Abstract:

Human Rights’ based education is a fundamental issue in today’s societies. It helps in preventing human rights’ abuses and violent conflicts, to promote equality and sustainable development and to increase the participation of people in decision-making processes in a Democratic system. From this idea came the initiative to hold a Higher Education project which gathered twelve universities from Mediterranean basin, six from Europe and six from the Maghreb in order to develop a project on human rights‘ based education to enhance equality and intellectual freedom.

The initiative came as a response to the second phase of the United Nations’ World Program for Human Rights Education 2010-2014. This program which aimed to forge a culture of rights, to promote common understanding on the basis of international instruments, principles and methodologies for human rights-based education, and to ensure that such education is taken into account in one dimension at National, regional and local levels in order to expand opportunities for cooperation and association at all levels.

Higher education is one of the two priority areas of the second phase of this global program. Through its core functions (research, teaching and service to the community), higher education institutions must provide ethical education to citizens engaged in the construction of peace and the defense of human rights. They are also responsible for generating global knowledge to address the current challenges of human rights, that is, eradication of poverty and discrimination, post-conflict reconstruction, and Sustainable development and intercultural understanding.

This paper intends to show how can an introduction to a human rights’ based approach in all the spheres of Higher Education enhance the promotion of the state of law. The project aimed to support higher education institutions in the Maghreb towards the integration of the human rights-based approach (ABDH) in law, social work, communication sciences, and Education in line with the proposals of the United Nations World Program for Human Rights Education. Thus, it started from a very clear vision that higher education is a driving force for the human, economic and social development of the Maghreb region and that it takes into account three major facts:
• The current social, cultural and political development in the Maghreb and the special interest in human rights and democracy in this new context
• The fundamental role of higher education in the evolution towards open and democratic societies.
• Support for the implementation of knowledge-based economies in the countries of the southern Mediterranean where education will play a decisive role.

On the basis of these facts, I will try to show in this paper how did this project propose a contribution to the enrichment of higher education programs in the Maghreb region through the introduction of a Master’s degree on Human Rights’ Based Approach to rethink Higher Education.

Keywords:

Human Rights' Based Education, ABDH, Higher Education, Competency-Based Approach.