Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution

The Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution is a research and training facility, with the overall goals of:

    Helping citizens of the Republic of Macedonia take an a active role in resolving seemingly intractable conflicts rooted in ethnic and other differences; and
    Promoting the concept of human rights and basic freedoms as an essential part of the political, juridical and social transformation that is going on in the country.

Achieving the main goal is based on undertaking various activities in three main areas:

Human rights aimed at:

    Dissemination of knowledge in the area of human rights and freedoms - by raising awareness of one’s own and the rights of others and creating conditions for active protection of one’s own and the rights of others by means of democratic mechanisms and the rule of law;
    Development and adaptation of the concept in order to implement it as widely as possible in Macedonia’s reality; and
    Transforming the existing understanding of human rights - from perceiving them as primarily collective. To accepting them as basically individual.

Conflict resolution aimed at:

    Changing people’s approach to conflicts - from looking at conflict as always being a destructive battle between incompatible interests, to perceiving it as a possibility for mutual growth and improvement of relationships which, besides interests, also involve needs, feelings and values; and
    Introducing techniques for the constructive and peaceful resolution of interpersonal and intergroup conflicts, based on cultural modification of the existing models of collaborative negotiation and mediation.