Between 5-8 April 2016 a team of three specialists of ICAR foundation(Romania) came to Oslo, Norway. The visit, was part of the project “Exploring the Romanian-Norwegian cooperation in the psycho-social area in the context of the migration flow in Europe” funded by the EEA Grants 2009-2014, through the NGO Fund in Romania, Fund for Bilateral Relations.
ICAR’s team visited several organisations/institutions and collected information about their activities, results, plans in the area of health and human rights.
Several visits took place at the Department of Psychology (UiO) – University of Oslo, where the Romanian team learned about the UiO area of interest, institutional history, researchers’ community, students and financing mechanisms. The topic of “impunity, justice in transitional societies (e.g. Romania), health consequences of human rights abuses” was identified as a topic of high interest for both the Norwegian and Romanian participants. Both parties are committed to seek funds for a partnership research in this area.
“Health and Human Rights Info” (HHRI), as a second Norwegian partner within the project, assisted ICAR team to meet other NGOs active in the human rights field. The future collaboration with HHRI is quite concrete and will consist in a series of training sessions that Norwegian experts will deliver to Romanian professionals in the area of sexual and gender based violence (Interesting opening for ICAR foundation to a new area of activity).
Translation of relevant chapters of the manual “Mental health and gender-based violence – Helping survivors of sexual violence in conflict” is also foreseen, especially knowing now that it contains tools that can be easely adapted for training in similar topics, for severely traumatised categories of people.