The Amel House of Human Rights (AHHR) was founded in 2009 to fill knowledge and educational gaps surrounding human rights advocacy and legal protection in Lebanon and the Arab world.
The project offers various human rights courses targeted mostly at young professionals. One of its most popular programmes is the annual Summer School on Law and Armed Conflict which attracts students from across the Middle East, some of whom are refugees themselves. This programme creates a space of solidarity where attendees can discuss some of the most pressing issues affecting the region.
Aiming to become a leading centre of knowledge in the field of human rights, the AHHR also offers its alumni research opportunities and partners with organisations to run rights-based projects. One such project is ‘Sanctuary in the City’, a programme which organised workshops with Beirut Municipality and the city’s refugee community, creating a platform of discussion for issues relating to refugee protection. The project oversaw the collective development of a draft local charter on human rights.
This case study was developed in the framework of the Mediterranean City-to-City Migration Project (MC2CM), a project coordinated by ICMPD and funded by the European Union and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The MC2CM project has been working since 2015 with Amman, Beirut, Lisbon, Lyon, Madrid, Tangiers, Tunis, Turin and Vienna to increase the knowledge base on urban migration.
Additionally, the project has sought to nurture a peer-to-peer dialogue and mutual learning on specific urban challenges such as social cohesion, intercultural dialogue, employment and provision of basic services for migrants, among others.
