SGI representatives participated in the second International Association of Human Rights Education (IAHRE) Conference on 12–13 June 2025 in London. University College London’s Institute of Education hosted the conference, which was attended by human rights education scholars, practitioners, governmental organizations and NGOs from countries across the world. The theme for this year’s conference was human rights education (HRE) and youth empowerment, reflecting the focus on Youth for the UN’s World Programme for Human Rights Education (WPHRE) 4th phase (2020–2024) and 5th phase (2025–2029). SGI became a member of IAHRE shortly after it was established in 2023 with the goal to be part of the development of human rights education research, scholarship and practice internationally.

Elisa Gazzotti and Lucy Plummer of SGI participated in the conference and delivered an oral presentation of their paper titled “Empowering Hope and Action: Human Rights Education to Unleash the Power of Youth.” The paper is based on a study analyzing the stories of a group of young human rights educators from South Africa, Mexico, Serbia, Japan and Morocco who are featured in Changemakers: Stories of Young Human Rights Educators, a project by SGI, Amnesty International and the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR). 

For the study, Gazzotti and Plummer conducted interviews with the young changemakers to learn about their personal journeys with HRE and applied SGI’s learning for empowerment model “Learn, Reflect, Empower, Lead,” which was introduced in SGI’s 2002 and 2012 proposals to the United Nations authored by SGI President Daisaku Ikeda. The model is based on SGI’s belief in people as the protagonists of change. When applied to the stories of the young changemakers, it illuminates how HRE has been a tool of empowerment—enabling them to address issues such as gender- and sexual-based discrimination, racism and inequality and exploitation of vulnerable children and youth—using a human rights-based approach that upholds and honors human dignity. As Soufiane Hennani, a changemaker who participated in the study said, “Because I learnt about human rights, I understood the impacts that I can have as a human.”

Gazzotti and Plummer’s study also recognizes SGI’s concept of “human revolution” in the youths’ stories, with each one highlighting the transformative impact that HRE can have from the perspective of enabling them to develop a greater sense of compassion in response to human rights violations. As Hennani further shared, “I have the possibility to look at the eyes of someone who is saying something sexist or something homophobic or someone who doesn't believe in human rights and explain to him that what he's saying is not good and it's unfair." This aspect of compassion was explored during the study in response to remarks made by UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Volker Türk who, during a high-level session at the UN Human Rights Council in February 2025, stated that “Human rights are nothing without compassion.” 

The IAHRE conference included a keynote talk by Baroness Shami Charkabarti, a lawyer, parliamentarian and leading British human rights defender, who discussed excerpts from her most recently published book Human Rights: The Case for the Defence. Conference delegates presented their work in the area of human rights education during three panel sessions across the two-day conference. Gazzotti and Plummer are preparing their paper for submission to the Human Rights Education Review, IAHRE’s journal launched in 2018 to provide a forum for research on human rights and human rights education.