Training Course 'Freedom of Expression: Speak Free but speak no hate'

From October 8th-16th 2016, in a very beautiful Croatian city Daruvar was held “Freedom of Expression: Speak Free but speak no hate” Training Course organized by IMPRESS Educational Social Youth Organization in cooperation with ECYON and No Hate Speech Movement Campaign (Youth Campaign of Council of Europe).

The Training Course was funded by European Commission, within the framework of Erasmus + and National Agency of Croatia.

Daruvar gathered 24 unique and wonderful representatives of eight European countries including Slovenia, Armenia, Romania, Azerbaijan, Germany, Turkey, Portugal and of course host country Croatia. The main objectives of the seminar were to train young people how to differentiate the freedom of speech and speech of hatred, to increase the level of awareness of youth especially about the consequences of online hate speech and the methods how to combat hate speech, the role of media and importance of media literacy etc. The Training Course gave the opportunity for participants to be in a role of judges for a while to practice the famous cases examined by European courts, to experience the difficulty of the examination and decision making process the consequences and responsibilities that can occur by setting the cases of freedom of expression and online hate speech.

Armenian team was represented by the members of Youth Alliance via Networking Educational NGO Arpine Kostanyan, Anahit Khachatryan including two representatives of National Campaign Committee of No Hate Speech Movement Armenia (NHSM) Arpine Sahakyan and National Campaign Coordinator of NHSM Armenia Nelli Gishyan, who was also one of the two trainers along with the representative of No Hate Speech Movement Turkey and trainer Mustafa Gundogdu.

This project will be remembered as one of those most successful and educative events ever done in our practice, as the training course was full of joy and energy, the warmest atmosphere was in every corner and in the air! - thanks to very well prepared and caring organizers- representatives of IMPRESS Tanja Herceg, Dubarvko Sopar and Andreja Aušperger personally who did their best to make every day full of nice surprises and impressive, for each person involved into this project.