Projects

About our network

The HRCN was established in 2019 with a vision to turn human rights into reality for everyone to foster inclusive democracy and social justice at city level.
For five years the organization has worked towards achieving its strategic objectives:

  • Creating synergies between international institutions, academics, and cities’ actors;
  • Expanding knowledge on human rights city standards and practices by documenting local experiences and informing on new trends;
  • Facilitating dialogue and collective reflection to develop methodology, tools and guidelines;
  • Providing learning capacities through specific expertise or customized services;
  • Advocating for a human rights agenda from the local to the global level to support the development of a human rights cities’ movement.

The member cities of the network are from Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and other EU countries. Moreover, Human Rights Cities Network collaborates extensively with cities, civil society, academia, and wider networks from non-EU countries.  

 
The organization works to raise awareness about the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and improve its implementation on a local level.
 
The HRCN is also part of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) experts’ group on human rights cities and contributed to the report on “Human rights cities in the EU: a framework for reinforcing rights locally” published in 2021.

Through our activities, we promote the EU Youth Strategy focusing on three core areas of action: Engage, Connect, Empower, while working on joined-up implementation across sectors.

What let to our projects:

In the past years we have gained extensive experience in organizing round tables, workshops and webinars that bring together local, EU and international stakeholders for better implementation of human rights on local level.

The most recent activities related to our projects where:

  1. The online panel discussion on “Equality and Inequalities in Urban Context” organized to mark the International Human Rights Day (Dec. 2023)
  2. The webinar on “Ensuring Human Rights in Cities: the Right to Vote in the 2024 European Parliament Elections” (May 2024) in cooperation with the Global Parliament of Mayors, in the framework of the European Capital of Democracy.

Mission and Vision

 Our mission is to create an information hub and support people to connect and scale up the successful expansion of human rights cities.

Our vision is to help make human rights a reality for every citizen, in every city; and in doing so to foster participatory democracy and social justice.

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