SYDHR Regional Youth Forum in Serbia

From Arminda Lathrop:

On August 16th-23rd, IDEA, Willamette University, and Association for Creative Communication and Debate (ACCD) in Serbia hosted the SYDHR Regional Youth Forum in Mataruska Banja, Serbia. The Regional Youth Forum was part of a larger project the three entities have been working on the past year, called Serbian Youth Debate Human Rights (SYDHR). SYDHR, sponsored by the U.S. Dept. of State, is a project that involves promoting human rights education and debate among youth in Serbia. ACCD has been organizing debate workshops, teacher seminars, and debate tournaments for the past year throughout Serbia. The project also involves the creation of a debate “wiki” in Serbian and the translation of IDEA textbooks into the Serbian language. The Regional Forum was a chance for the three project partners to invite youth from outside of Serbia to join the project—and the debate—as well.

Students, teachers, and coaches from throughout Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Slovenia attended the SYDHR Forum. Thank you to help from IDEA’s local partners in these countries (Logos, CKD, MEF, and ZIP respectively), the event was well-attended and successful. Students left tired but satisfied, excited about debate and all of their new acquaintances!

For the first three days of the event, students and teachers took classes in human rights, leadership, and debate. Human rights and leadership classes involved activities such as debating about human rights and the Olympics, problem solving about child labor, and creating the Constitution for a new hypothetical country, “Freedonia.” Debate classes taught topic preparation and Karl Popper strategy. At the end of the day, students were exhausted—but not too exhausted for walking in the park, participating in evening activities (Macedonians are great dancers), or writing messages for their “secret friends.” Students were assigned a secret friend at the beginning of the week; they could send their secret friend nice messages or gifts, their identity not revealed until the end of the week. The secret friends board was filled with messages, candies, and some admittedly odd items.

The two-day tournament at the end of the Forum was a mixed teams tournament—three-person teams consisted of people from at least two countries. Affirmative and negative sides battled over the resolution, “Multinational businesses should be bound by international human rights law.” Debates were judged by coaches from the U.S. and from the 5 countries in attendance, and all judges agreed that debaters did an excellent job with a very complex topic. Congratulations, SYDHR Debaters!

For more information about the SYDHR project—or to see photos from the SYDHR Forum, you can visit www.idebate.org/sydhr or join the SYDHR Facebook Group called, SYDHR Mat(a)rushka Banja: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=79102500001.