From April 20th to April 26 th, 2012 the first edition of MICC World will take place in the international Youth Meeting Centre and Memorial Site Krzyżowa in Poland.

MICC World brings together high school students from Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Afghanistan, Uganda, South Africa and Vietnam.

The project aims to raise awareness for human rights and educate high-school students about methods of their protection. MICC World sets a strong focus on the international youth meeting character of the project to foster intercultural dialogue and understanding.

MICC World is premised on the rationale that motivating young people to invest their time and capacities in the protection of human rights needs more than just knowledge. It is the first hand experience that creates that sort of motivation needed. This experience is offered through the trial simulations at the heart of MICC.

During the project the students explore their roles as prosecutors, members of the defence, judges or members of the observing media in multinational teams. The subject content of the simulations are final pleadings of historic cases that were heard before the international tribunals, namely the Nuremberg Tribunal, the ICTY and the ICTR. In that context students get to know more about the background of the conflicts, learn who was responsible, but also learn that a fair trial is the basis for sustainable justice and the protection of human rights.

When being admitted to the program, participants are placed in multinational teams. Before coming to Krzyżowa, they get to know each other via e-mail and online-forums already.

The simulation is embedded into a series of workshops and trainings. During their stay in Krzyżowa, the students participate in workshops on human rights, the resistance against totalitarian regimes and the historic background of the cases. In their teams, the participants receive legal and rhetorical trainings to learn about their roles and learn how to adequately argue and debate their roles and cases during the simulation.

MICC World attempts to introduce Human Rights Education to schools and curricula in the world. We believe that Human Rights Education is fundamental to political education. However it seldom forms part of the main stream school curricula. MICC therefore invites the accompanying teachers to take part in teachers' training workshops that explore the possibilities of incorporation Human Rights Education in the school curriculum. To this end, MICC does not merely spread knowledge of Human Rights Education, but multiplies its work across the represented nations through the agency of its immediate beneficiaries.

Partners:
Afghan Youth Forum, Kabul, Afghanistan
Vietnam and Friends, Hanoi, Vietnam
International Association for Intercultural Education, Den Haag, Netherlands
Rhodes University Law Clinic, Grahamstown, South Africa
Amnesty International, Ljubljana, Slovenia
African Youth Initiative Network, Lira, Uganda
Krzyżowa Foundation for Mutual Understanding, Grodziszcze, Poland
Kreisau-Initiative e.V., Berlin, Germany


The project is funded with the support from the German Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future“, the “Youth in Action” programme of the European Commission, the Foundation “Avec et pour autres” and the German-South African Lawyers Association.