The Policy Brief Becoming a Human Rights City has been published in the Working Paper Series of the Institute for Human Rights in January 2023.

A translation into Finnish of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency publication How to make human rights part of everyone’s daily life – a guide for local authorities, which has been developed to assist cities in the process of becoming a human rights city will be provided to FRA by the Human Rights Cities project in the beginning of 2023. A translation into Swedish is underway in Sweden. 

The Closing Seminar of the Human Rights Cities project was held on 12 December 2022. In her opening remarks, Geraldine Guille, specialist in policy analysis and stakeholder cooperation, EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) pointed out some benefits of becoming a Human Rights City. Firstly, it entails a holistic approach to the realisation of human rights in a city. Secondly, human rights become a topic for the city administration, thus facilitating their incorporation into the city culture. Thirdly, becoming a Human Rights City provides a concrete way to take a stand for human rights. Ms Guille observed that the City of Turku already is very progressive, for example, with regard to its work on the implementation of Agenda 2030 and in having participatory processes as part of its general practice. Sampo Ruoppila, Head of Research, City of Turku, noted that Turku actively works on promoting equality and prevention of social exclusion in many different manners and raised the question whether the human rights city concept could offer a strategic framework to coordinate and structure this work. The project team then presented its policy paper, including recommendations for the city of Turku on the various aspects that it might want to take into account if it considers becoming a human rights city. Björn Grönholm, Director for Strategic Projects, City of Turku, welcomed the research and noted that it was in line with the spirit of the current city of Turku Mayor’s Programme for the development of city services. He envisaged that the human rights based approach could be introduced into city development through ongoing increased use of horizontal leadership. In the ensuing panel conversation, stakeholders welcomed the idea of an increased bottom-up approach and called for a more visible and centralised source of information on human rights issues, including the rights of inhabitants in relation to local issues. The seminar was closed with the note by Björn Grönholm that Turku will in the near future consider possible next steps. 

The Policy Brief Becoming a Human Rights City has been published and is available here: Policy paper FINAL. A translation into Finnish will be available shortly.

The Human Rights Cities project in co-operation with the Turku City library organised on 28 September 2022 a discussion forum: Equal access to the library services in Turku and digitalisation: A Human Rights Based Approach. At the forum, the project team published the case study ‘Yhtäläinen pääsy Turun kirjastopalveluihin ja digitalisaatio’ in which the realisation in Turku of equal access to the library services in a digital environment was analysed.