Youth Initiative for Human Rights

Sarajevo

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Youth Initiative for Human Rights

 

Youth Initiative for Human Rights (YIHR) is a regional network of non-governmental organisations with programmes in Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.

Since their foundation in 2003, the Youth Initiative for Human Rights has been fighting for the same values.

The basic values of the Initiative are truth, justice, accountability, equality, freedom, democracy and peace. We are fighting for peace in the region, not only for the absence of war, but for the peace as a lasting process which means dealing with the past and which results in continuous co-operation between the states and people in the region. 

We do not accept belligerent politics and war crimes in public space – we insist on respecting the established facts and on both legal conviction and moral condemnation of persons responsible for crimes committed during the wars in former Yugoslavia. We educate young people from the region about the heritage of war through dialogue on the perspectives of democratic development of our societies. 

Aware that there is no democracy without civic activism, YIHR activists protect human rights and refuse to give up on hard-fought freedoms.

The headquarters of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights are situated in Belgrade, Zagreb, Podgorica, Sarajevo and Prishtina.

The focus of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights is on societies and citizens, above all the youth, who are least familiar with the events and war crimes committed during the 1990s, where nationalist ideologies, which led to wars and where all sides celebrate their war criminals as “heroes”, still prevail.

More than 15,000 secondary school pupils, students, legal specialists, artists, journalists, human rights activists, filmmakers and writers have gone through exchange programs which the Youth Initiative for Human Rights has been organising since the first day. In 15 years of work, the Initiative has published several hundreds of press releases, more than 30 analytic reports and studies, organised 200 training programs, more than 150 regional exchange programs, 300 street actions and protests, and won 15 cases before national and international courts.

 

Seminar

Liverpool 

United Kingdom  2022

Seminar

Durrës • Tirana 

Albania  2014