NHRC Ends Fifth ITEC Human Rights Course for Global South

What concluded

A training course run for the human rights watchdogs of other developing countries has finished in New Delhi. This was the fifth edition, held under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation banner, and it ran six days from 14 September 2026.

Two arms of government shared the work. The National Human Rights Commission of India put the programme together, and the Ministry of External Affairs partnered on it, which is the usual shape for an ITEC offering aimed at foreign officials.

Who came

Thirty-eight senior functionaries attended, drawn from fourteen national human rights institutions. The list reaches across four continents: Algeria, Chile, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Oman, Samoa, South Africa, Tajikistan and Zimbabwe.

That spread is the point of the exercise. These are institutions doing broadly the same job in very different legal systems, and the programme is built on the premise that they have more to learn from one another than from any single model.

The closing address

Justice V. Ramasubramanian, who chairs the Commission, delivered the valedictory address. His argument was for closer cooperation between such bodies across the Global South. Institutions improve, he said, by putting their experience on the table, naming the difficulties they face and being willing to learn from errors rather than conceal them.

Joint Secretaries Shri Samir Kumar and Smt. Saidingpuii Chhakchhuak were present at the session, along with other senior officers.

What was covered

Sessions were interactive rather than lecture-led, and brought in eminent persons and domain experts. The ground covered both halves of the rights framework: civil and political rights on one side, and socio-economic and cultural rights on the other. Aspects of governance were addressed alongside them.

Why this appears in exams

Two threads make this testable. One is the institution itself, the NHRC and who chairs it. The other is ITEC, India's long-running technical cooperation programme, which turns up regularly in questions on foreign policy and soft power. An item that joins the two is worth noting.