What we do

CONTEXT

14th of January 2015

In a world where the economic crisis and the fight against terrorism and corruption have absorbed the public debate, the individual rights and liberties seem to have fallen in desuetude. Moreover, the post-Decembrist period has deprived the Romanian society of interiorizing, valuing and securing these rights, vitally necessary for the development of any modern state centered on serving its citizens in good faith. Now and in this context we are asked to give up some of these rights, while plainly being told that for security reasons it’s better for us this way, or that there aren’t enough funds because, generically speaking, we’re in a crisis.

Since as early as 2003, the Centre for Legal Resources (CLR) has operated in defending the human rights (of people with mental disabilities and those discriminated) and the rule of law and its inherent institutions (that ought to respect and defend these rights). After these 12 years of progress and regress, of work and battle against the central and local public administration authorities, we can conclude that the perspective of these institutions, with few exceptions, is tainted by a lack of interest and preconceptions. A person from a vulnerable group (whether it is a person with disabilities or from the Roma community or that it’s a child under the state’s social care etc.) has all the “chances” to receive a discriminatory treatment exactly from the institutions called to defend his or her rights or to investigate potential abuses that he or she are suffering or have suffered.

We believe that our rights and liberties, in order to be respected by the state’s institutions, respectively in order for them to be valued in their full entirety, we need to poses a culture of ethics and integrity in the public space.

GENERAL DIRECTIONS OF ACTION

The Centre for Legal Resources, through its team of human rights lawyers and experts, acts on several tiers:

  • We conduct our own investigations, take over cases of abuses against the rights of institutionalized people with mental disabilities and go through all the necessary trial steps for securing these rights;
  • We make proposals of improving the human rights legal framework, or for creating a norm where there is none;
  • We track the way that public policies in the fields of human rights and integrity are being implemented and we identify the vulnerabilities within the system.

For more details regarding our programmes, follow the links below:

ANTI-DISCRIMINATION

PUBLIC INTEGRITY

ADVOCATE FOR DIGNITY

STRATEGIC LITIGATION