News | Thursday, 16th November 2017

UN human rights meeting to be addressed by visiting research fellow

Dr Ornette Clennon will discuss how best to audit sustainability goals

Dr Ornette Clennon
Visiting research fellow Dr Ornette Clennon co-leads the Critical Race and Ethnicity Research Cluster at Manchester Metropolitan University.

A visiting research fellow from Manchester Metropolitan University is to participate in a UN meeting at its Geneva offices.

Dr Ornette Clennon will address the United Nations’ Regional meeting for Europe, Central Asia and North America, organised for later this month by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

He is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in the confluence between culture, race, neoliberalism, communities and social justice and co-leads the Critical Race and Ethnicity Research Cluster at Manchester Metropolitan University.

The UN event will take place later this month and is the second regional meeting of five that is part of the awareness-raising campaign for the International Decade for People of African Descent (IDPAD).

The meeting will provide an opportunity to reflect on ways that governments from Europe, Central Asia and North America in partnership with equality bodies, national human rights institutions and civil society, might pursue the integration of the provisions of the IDPAD programmes of activities in their policies, programmes and strategies that are tailored for people of African descent.

Importance of monitoring tools

Dr Clennon will be taking part in a thematic discussion section of the meeting called Development: Towards Provision of Effective Remedies and Reparatory Justice.

He will share a reporting matrix that University staff have developed as an audit tool for a programme of research within the Critical Race and Ethnicity Research Cluster, which maps relevant the UN's Sustainable Development Goals across to the Official for National Statistics, Stonewall International, World Bank and Race Disparity Audit data. 

Dr Clennon, who is part of the Social Change: Community Wellbeing Research Centre, said: "It is really important that we equip our grassroots community organisations with the monitoring tools that can provide solid evidence of how their work advances the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals for social justice."

Dr Clennon feels that reporting mechanisms of this kind will give authorities such as the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights better opportunities to monitor how the United Kingdom is managing the Human Rights of its BAME citizens, which is very important in light of the recent Race Disparity Audit.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is organising the meetings to focus on trends, priorities and challenges at the national and regional levels to effectively implement the IDPAD’s programme of activities and provide a space to exchange good practices.

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