DPP Associate Professor Kirsten Roberts Lyer authors toolkit on Parliaments and Human Rights for International IDEA

DPP Associate Professor, Kirsten Roberts Lyer, has authored a new Toolkit for International IDEA's INTER PARES project on Effective Human Rights Engagement for Parliamentary Bodies.

The Toolkit was launched at an online seminar on 20 September 2022. The seminar brought together leading experts in the fields of parliaments, human rights, and democratic engagement, all taking part in an interactive discussion moderated by Dr Roberts Lyer. Panellists included members of parliamentary human rights committees from Bhutan, Chile, The Maldives, Portugal and Spain, representatives of civil society, academia and National Human Rights Institutions, and from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Inter-Parliamentary Union and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The seminar is available online.

As described in the introduction, the new Toolkit it "aims to provide support to parliaments that are already working, or are aiming to work, on human rights issues. The toolkit looks at the mandates and competencies of parliamentary human rights bodies, the factors that contribute to their effective functioning and how they can operationalize their human rights work in practice. It particularly focuses on specialized human rights committees, which are considered best practice for parliaments in human rights engagement, allowing for a build-up of expertise, creating a centralized focus and encouraging mainstreaming." 

Dr Roberts Lyer has worked on the issue of parliamentary engagement with human rights for more than 10 years. Her previous publications on this topic include Parliaments as Human Rights Actors: The Potential for International Principles on Parliamentary Human Rights Committees, published in the Nordic Journal of Human Rights (2019).