Human Rights Program
Human Right is a main part of CCA’s program. CCA is working to promote, protect, monitor and documentation of the human rights since 1990. CCA is a leading human rights organization in Afghnistan and has many outstanding achievements in this period. CCA was one of the few civic groups to maintain a presence in Afghanistan throughout Taliban era via its offices in Kabul, Mazar-I-Sharif and Bamiyan. During this time CCA provided critical information on human rights abuses, perpetrated by both Taliban regime and Northern Alliance warlords, to the international community via its contacts with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Currently CCA is concentrating on awareness-raising, training and rights-based service provision to vulnerable groups. The following are examples of recent projects:
- Human Rights Specialized Training for Human Rights Activiest in Afghanistan: This project is going to help Afghan human rights organizations become more focused and professional in their work and by doing so improve the effectiveness and impact of human rights initiatives in Afghanistan. The project provides specialized human rights training which has been formulated and designed based on the human rights training needs assessment of civil society organizations for 100 human rights and civil society organizations actors in Kabul and two regional areas of Balkh in the North and Bamyan in the Center of the country.
- Human Rights Awareness Workshop:
- Civic Education for Parliamentary Election (Bamyan, Baghlan): comprehensive civic education campaign prior to the last parliamentary elections, with particular emphasis on encouraging participation of women, minorities and marginalised groups. The project is concerned with women’s political participation (as candidates and voters) in the parliamentary elections in northern and central Afghanistan.
- Civic Education for Parliamentary Election (Bamyan, Baghlan): comprehensive civic education campaign prior to the last parliamentary elections, with particular emphasis on encouraging participation of women, minorities and marginalised groups. The project is concerned with women’s political participation (as candidates and voters) in the parliamentary elections in northern and central Afghanistan.
- Social rehabilitation for traumatised children (Kabul): trained staff works with children suffering from war and post war conflict trauma/stress in a day care center, where children are offered educational, health, feeding facility, leisure/play activities and children’s rights awareness.
- Community and Local Government Capacity Building (Bamyan): This programme is aimed at promoting democratic decision making through enhancing the capacities of local institutions and local governments, with a special emphasis on targeting local representative bodies (i.e shuras). The project activities consist of training of judges, local authorities and police, as well as good governance training for local shuras.
- Psychosocial Project for Widows (Bamyan):this project helped 150 widows of victims of the massacre by the Taliban in 2001, through counseling and vocational training in Yakawlang district.
- Access to Justice (Wardak): The project had three components of capacity building of concerned local government, awareness-raising among villagers (3000 people) and advocacy.
- Survey of family violence (Southern/Easter Afghanistan): CCA did the survey in 10 southern and eastern provinces over 10 months, in partnership with Global Rights. The survey results was published and shared with civil society organizations.
- Mapping of services available for victims of family violence in the North and Kabul.
- Partnership on family violence activities with Medica Mondiale (Mazar-e-Sharif): CCA staff members have worked alongside Medica Mondiale’s “Women at Risk” project attending all internal trainings and receiving skills and capacity building. As a result, CCA staff established advice surgeries and counselling support in Sultan Razia Girls School, in partnership with one Community District Forum, Department of Women Affairs and women’s NGO in Mazar-e-Sharif. This was in response to the high rate of school girls running away from family home due to child and forced marriages.
- Women Protection and Empowerment Project (Balkh, Samangan, Baghlan): building on the experience and skills gained through the partnership with Medica Mondiale, this was a three year project aimed at raising awareness on violence against women and strengthening the prevention and response capacity to individual cases of family violence. This included training to communities, NGOs and key institutional actors, provision of counseling to women facing family violence related problems and protection of women whose personal safety is at risk for reasons connected to family violence (safe house).