This Sunday, 1st June 2025, marks the Global Day of Parents as recognised by the UN General Assembly. This day, which was first recognised in 2012, is an opportunity to show appreciation to parents and the support of families worldwide, as well as reflecting on the importance of the well-being and development of children. 

To mark this day, we would like to share a resource we co-designed with the Parent and Carer Alliance (PCA) as part of our UK community programme. We worked with PCA to produce a human rights resource to empower parents and carers of children with special educational needs and disabilities to use human rights when challenging decisions of local authorities and schools. 

The resource contains real-life stores and issues that have been provided by PCA and features key information about human rights, as well as practical flowcharts and tools. 

At a time when the UK government is looking at children’s rights to special educational support, it’s important to remember that Human Rights Act protections apply also, and can empower parents with an advocacy tool to advocate for dignity and equal respect.   

In continuing to share some of the great work done by community groups across the UK, we would like to share our work with the Scottish Recovery Consortium (SRC). SRC is an organisation that works across Scotland to support recovery from addiction by working with individuals, organisations, and government. Our human rights leadership programme, which we recently reran in 2023-2024, supported a Scotland-wide cohort of recovery advocates to improve their knowledge of human rights law and their confidence to use it in their conversations with public bodies to push for rights-respecting decisions. 100% of the community advocates who took part said they would recommend the programme, and that they were more likely to take action to uphold people’s rights. From the programme, 3 people shared how they have used the Human Rights Act to support people in recovery:  

• Empowering a woman to seek accountability for the death of her loved one 

• Securing medical treatment for someone held in a police cell 

• Challenging an arbitrary housing decision to move someone in recovery.

Find out more about commissioning BIHR’s practical human rights support for your organisation and community: training@bihr.org.uk  

Reflecting on the work we have produced with community groups across the UK serves as a reminder of how important using human rights is in community work, and the desire from community groups for this work to continue. Whilst we were able to provide support to 30 community groups over the course of the programme, we had applications from 106 groups in total, a clear indication of the appetite for human rights-based approaches in community work. 

This demand cuts across different areas of community work, including poverty, addiction and recovery, and domestic abuse. However, the programme showed a larger demand for human rights-approaches in Asylum and Migrant Support, and Health and Disability. 

The funding for the programme came about at a time where very existence of the Human Rights Act 1998 was at risk. Whilst some believe the threat to human rights has now been resolved, we are living in times of increased division. Many people still struggling to have their rights protected daily, and they lack the human rights knowledge and support to challenge this.  

We currently do not have funding to continue the UK wide community programme; however, we will not stop exploring ways to continue working with community groups to emphasise the universalism of human rights and learn more about how Human Rights Act advocacy in community groups can be developed further. We collaborated with some of those community groups to create a video reflecting on the community programme and the importance of this work, and we have written our first blog piece that reflects the need for this work to continue.    

At BIHR, we’re strong believers that the law is a tool, but what really matters is how you put it into practice. Our human rights training programmes are focused on how human rights law applies to everyday life – whether that’s in healthcare, social services, refugee rights, education or elsewhere. We work on building up people’s confidence in not just talking about human rights but taking action. Or, as one of our previous event participants put it, “BIHR communicate how human rights are relevant to everyone's day-to-day life, not something in a dusty book.”  

One of the ways we do this in our training programmes is through the incorporation of Group Thinking Spaces. These are opportunities for programme participants to think through and discuss issues as a group, with the support of our Human Rights Officers. Participants often bring the real-life scenarios they’re facing and support one another to look at the issue with a human rights lens and come up with potential solutions.  

We recently incorporated Group Thinking Spaces into a human rights programme for staff working in mental health care and received great feedback from attendees:  

"I recently competed Human Rights training with BIHR.  I found the training sessions extremely interesting and informative, coupled with the Group Thinking Space (GTS) where I was able to put the teaching into practice.  

I found the GTS instrumental to my learning and development as it enabled me to apply the tools that we learned in the training sessions to real time scenarios. Having Katrin at the sessions listening and guiding us to explore possibilities and ideas was critical. It felt like a safe space to voice my ideas with the support of an expert who would help me to consider alternative perspectives if needed.  

I personally feel that the GTS has been essential to the understanding I now have of human rights. I would look forward to attending the sessions which offered a dedicated space to expanding my knowledge with my peers.”   

Abigail Holder Equality, Diversity and Human Rights Officer at Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust. 

The Housing Ombudsman Service has published a report on living conditions in social housing in England 

This week, the Housing Ombudsman Service (HOS) has published a report outlining increasingly poor living conditions in social housing throughout England. The report points to asbestos, mould and damp, leaks, and pest control as being prevalent issues that need to be addressed.  

The HOS report also expressed concern about increasingly poor or slow services from landlords, leading to a loss of trust from tenants. HOS has recommended a “transformative overhaul” of the current system, expressing concern that the way landlords deal with tenants can “lack dignity and respect.” 

Dignity and Respect are core pillars of our legal rights under the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). Particularly under Article 8 which protects our right to physical and emotional wellbeing. It not only vital, but also legally essential that public housing is operated in a way that protects our basic rights. 

We have worked with HOS in 2024 and 2025 to support them in addressing human rights concerns in their work. This included delivering workshops for their staff on the HRA and how they can use it practically. We hope to continue building on this work to develop and deliver programmes on using the HRA as means to secure housing accountability