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in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the rights of Africa’s indigenous peoples. The
Department also maintains the Africa Renewal website in English and French (www.un.org/AR).
4. Public and educational outreach
61. During 2007, eight NGO briefings were devoted to human rights issues, including
discrimination, indigenous rights, and extreme poverty, with the remainder relating to
International Women’s Day, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the
200th anniversary of the abolition of the trans-atlantic slave trade, the International Day for the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination, World Press Freedom Day and Human Rights Day.
62. The Department has begun planning for the sixty-first Annual DPI/NGO Conference in
commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. DPI
has invited UNESCO, the Government of France and OHCHR to be co-organizers of the event,
which is expected to be held in Paris in September 2008.
63. During the reporting period, the Department’s Public Relations Section
organized 33 in-house briefings with a total attendance of 1,027 participants and two outside
speaking engagements with a total attendance of 260 participants on the subject of human rights.
64. The Department’s Public Inquiries Unit and CyberSchoolBus Unit host an annual
multimedia human rights conference for students drawn from the United States and around the
world. The conference seeks to promote awareness and to prompt action among student leaders
about human rights in general. The 2007 Student Conference focused on recognizing the rights
of indigenous peoples. In addition to producing the background document and developing the
conference website, the CyberSchoolBus Unit added a new feature on its site - live video chats.
The Public Inquiries Unit responded to 24,331 e-mails, petitions, walk-in enquiries, letters and
telephone calls specifically on human rights.
65. The CyberSchoolBus Unit also launched its first WebQuest on a human rights topic: the
use of child soldiers. WebQuest is an educational tool which seeks to build knowledge and then
offers options to test this knowledge through the online presentation of study resources and
ready-made quizzes. The WebQuest on child soldiers includes an examination of the Convention
on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocol, and looks at the involvement of children in
armed conflict. In November, the Unit also launched an additional site on the Convention to
highlight its eighteenth anniversary, which includes a new curriculum on the Convention, along
with a multimedia slide show developed in partnership with Magnum Photos. This launch was
accompanied by a live video chat with a representative of UNICEF who spoke about the
Convention with teachers and students.
66. The Department’s Dag Hammarskjold Library has begun work on a web page that will
highlight the early documents that led up to the adoption of the resolution containing the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. These will include the documents of the
Nuclear Committee, the Drafting Committee and the first session of the Commission on
Human Rights, and Third Committee of the General Assembly documents.
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