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Open Justice Centre’s helping to deliver UN global education project

Open Justice's UNODC project

The Law School’s Open Justice Centre has joined forces with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to help deliver its Education for Justice (E4J) initiative.

E4J aims to facilitate and promote university-level teaching on issues related to UNODC’s mandate areas including anti-corruption, organised crime, human trafficking and migrant smuggling, counter-terrorism, cybercrime, crime prevention and criminal justice, firearms, as well as on integrity and ethics.

The Open Justice Centre has been working closely with UNODC to develop an online teaching resource to support the global roll-out of the E4J initiative. This is expected to be available in July for university lecturers worldwide to help with their teaching of integrity and ethics for the next academic year and beyond.

Open Justice is collaborating with former OU colleague Dr Nceku Nyathi, now at De Montfort University, who has implemented the E4J initiative while teaching in South Africa. The Centre welcomed Nceku and several Vienna-based UN colleagues to the OU during their recent visit to the UK. They are shown together with Hugh McFaul from the Open Justice Centre at a project meeting on campus in Milton Keynes.

Hugh has recently collaborated with UN colleagues at an anti-corruption conference in Florence, Italy, and they also plan to work together in promoting the initiative at the Global Alliance for Justice Education’s (GAJE’s) 10th Worldwide Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in December.

It’s fantastic to be involved in this Education for Justice initiative which has a potential global impact, as well as offering the opportunity to work on similar projects in the future with the UN. It’s a great vote of confidence for the Open Justice Centre and our online distance learning credentials following our successful project in 2018 with Advice UK to develop an online learning learning module in discrimination and human rights law training for charities

Hugh McFaul
Director of the Open Justice Centre Read more about the project

Encouraging a culture of the rule of law in schools and universities through the E4J initiative is one of four specific and inter-related components in UNODC’s wide-ranging Global Programme, which aims to make 2001’s Doha Declaration a reality. The others are strengthening judicial integrity and the prevention of corruption; fostering prisoner rehabilitation and social integration; and preventing youth crime through sports.

This four-year initiative promotes peaceful, corruption-free and inclusive societies for sustainable development, and aims to help countries achieve a positive and sustainable impact on criminal justice, corruption prevention and the rule of law.