On April 3^rd, around 40 students from the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Arts at An-Najah participated in a workshop on promoting electoral participation in the Palestinian society. The workshop was organized at the University as part of a series of workshops that are held in coordination with the Palestinian Central Elections Commission and the Italian Representation.

This was the third workshop to be held at An-Najah and supervised by the UNESCO Chair on Human Rights and Democracy at the University in which a number of sociology students attended. The students discussed several issues related to elections, their concepts and tools with the trainers.

Mr. Samer Aqrouq, supervisor and trainer in the workshop said that they carefully selected the students to participate in the workshop based on the cultural diversity and the geographical distribution of the students; being selected from different cultural and regional backgrounds means that the students will be able to transfer their experience to their communities regarding the elections.

He added the fact that having the sociology students as the main target group of this workshop stemmed out from the important role those students can play in information transfer and carrying out training for other people in their own communities. Also, those students possess high level abilities to transfer the knowledge they acquired to people from the different social groups.

The purpose of this workshop, he explained, was to train students from the different faculties at the University on a variety of topics related to elections so as to let those students, in turn, organize introductory workshops in their own communities to teach the people about the different concepts in elections.

The University is concerned with holding such workshops to reinforce the democratic tendencies of the Palestinian people and to enable all the Palestinians to receive information wherever they are.

Among the attendees also was Mr. As’ad Taffal from the Department of Sociology and Social Work, who described the issue of elections as one of the most common topics that are included in more than one course at the Department.

Mr. Nafeth Hamad from the Faculty of Law, also a trainer in the workshop, said these workshops were designed to familiarize the participants with the elections law and the different information it contains regarding the types of elections, their goals, who has the right to be nominated and elected, the elections’ propaganda, the counting of votes, announcement of results and other issues.