Youth Working Group
Thanks to the Youth Working Group, IFOR provides young people with the skills and opportunities to become active peacemakers. This is done through nonviolence and leadership training, campaigning, and through internships with IFOR branches and groups, or with the International Secretariat.
Peace and Constitution Committee Working Group (PCCWG)
The "Peace and Constitution Committee" Working Group works to preserve and implement the Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution which denounces war and war-preparation activities. The PCCWG produces materials to fidduse the message of Japanese Peace Constitution and aims at get it translated in as many languages as possible.
“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. 2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.” (article 9)
In collaboration with the Japanese Institute of Constitutional Law, members of JFOR work with a group of the Spanish Lawyers to have "the basic Human Rights for Peaceful Living", (article 97 of Japanese Constitution) to be included into the UN Charter.
Nonviolent Education Program (NVE)
IFOR’s NVE program is aiming at supporting sustainable implementation of nonviolence/nonviolent education, peace education and violence prevention in compulsory kindergarten and school education and thus consequent implementation of Children’s Rights.
With the ratification of the Convention of the Rights of the Child nearly all states are obliged to “undertake all appropriate legislative, administrative, and other measures for the implementation of the rights recognized in the present Convention“ (Art. 4 CRC). Although CRC and many school laws are underpinning children´s rights to non-violent, gender-sensitive education and care nor on international nor on national levels hardly any measures can be found to introduce systematic non-violent education as an integral part of public education (Füssinger 2012):
- Development of key competence of children allowing „responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin, (...) the development of respect for the natural environment“ (Art. 29 d, e CRC) is mostly included in laws and curricula but excluded from the systematic and sustainable education planning, implementation and evaluation of educational measures.
- Sustainable, systematic and continuing non-violent education, peace education, violence prevention, human rights education are still in most countries optional as well in teacher education as well as in pre-primary and primary education. Teachers are neither prepared to systematically and sustainably plan, implement and evaluate children’s key competences nor prepared to systematically develop a non-violent, child-friendly environment.
NVE aims at implementing measures allowing systematic and sustainable implementation of children’s rights to non-violent education and Pre-Study on the development of a competence model for teacher education allowing sustainable implementation of state’s responsibility for education in line with children´s rights to non-violent education.
