Project Objectives

Introduction

Social and especially organized violence is one of the most destructive forces impacting on health, quality of life of individuals and groups, and on civil society in general. Careful interaction with and support of survivors in legal procedures, documentation, monitoring and persecution leading to both prevention and rehabilitation have been targeted therefore by international standards by the UN "Istanbul Protocol Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment" (IP).

However, legal, social and medical workers are usually not aware of or are not proficient in the IP. The IP is too large and provides no specific didactical strategy or sufficient details to actually permit direct application, neither does it provide some country specific details required to make it applicable. The consortium follows the strong demands of the WMA and UN bodies to provide materials in a sample curriculum to address this needs.

Objectives

The overall objective is to enable medical, legal and social professionals to address one of the most fundamental concerns in protecting individuals from torture: effective documentation, that brings evidence of torture and ill-treatment to light so that perpetrators may be held accountable for their actions and the interests of justice may be served.

In order to achieve this goal, the specific objectives are:

• to make processional users aware of and to qualify them in the IP and to enable them - to professional documentation of violence, reporting to legal networks and institutions - to provide a realistic low- barrier, work-flow embeddable, flexible and sustainable curriculum structure and learning materials
• to make the IP an everyday instrument in European health care and legal practice and also in European asylum procedures
• to use interdisciplinary and collaborative (COLE) approaches to address the focus and user needs to link legal and health care networks into a continuous process.