Trainer-of-trainers Workshop for the Attorney General’s Department in Sri Lanka

The Foundation delivers Human Rights Reporting Workshop in Negombo in cooperation with the Attorney General’s Department of Sri Lanka

From 22 to 24 October 2022, the Max Planck Foundation conducted a workshop in Negombo, Sri Lanka in partnership with the Attorney General’s Department of Sri Lanka. The workshop was attended by seven of the Department’s lawyers from across Sri Lanka who will provide future training for their colleagues.

The workshop was focused on UN treaty body reporting with a focus on periodic reporting, as well as the other areas of State party engagement with treaty bodies. After introducing the UN human rights mechanisms, the Max Planck Foundation’s staff focused on the process and best practices in State party reporting to treaty bodies. The lawyers participated in complex exercises to simulate a treaty reporting cycle and had to identify the relevant information and draft a state-party report on the implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Following the treaty reporting process, they also engaged in a simulation constructive dialogue, and prepared a list of issues and concluding observations. Their active participation in the simulation demonstrated how such exercises may be used to advance the skills of future trainees of the Attorney General’s Department.

Further to treaty reporting, the trainer-of-trainers workshop addressed how State parties may engage with other functions of treaty bodies, namely general comments, country visits, and individual and inter-State communications. Throughout the workshop, the participants considered how to further advance the implementation of the core human rights treaties in Sri Lanka with both legal and non-legal measures.

This was the first of two Trainer-of-trainer workshops to be held in partnership with the Attorney General’s Office of Sri Lanka as part of the German Federal Foreign Office-funded project, “Advancing Institutional Capacity in the Sri Lankan Justice System”.