CEHRI’s psychosocial support includes individual assessment and accompaniment during particularly stressful events like interviews with public prosecutors; pre-interview briefings; debriefing sessions; and continuous follow-up with survivors. We believe in the importance of keeping survivors informed and actively involved throughout the entire legal process. This involvement ensures that they have a significant role in decision-making and fully understand every action taken on their behalf. Our team recognises that survivor and witness support is a very complex process and we are committed to keep developing and improving our comprehensive, survivor-centred approach. We achieve this through ongoing consultation with our clients, promoting feedback, and periodically training all our team members. Our training focuses on trauma-informed care; minimising the risks of retraumatization and vicarious trauma; cultural competencies; gender-sensitive care and adherence to the Istanbul Protocol.
One of the core elements of our approach is the close collaboration between our in-house legal team and our mental health experts. This integrated team works together to ensure that our legal proceedings are informed by an understanding of the psychological impacts on our clients. Our legal experts focus on the judicial aspect, while our mental health professionals provide the necessary emotional and psychological support, to mitigate stress and anxiety and make legal processes more manageable for the survivors. The legal team’s consistent communication with clients is complemented by the psychosocial team’s efforts to address immediate and long-term mental health concerns.
We are mindful that traditional Western therapeutic models are not always in line with the cultural backgrounds of our clients and believe that cultural competence in therapy is crucial. Therefore, a key component of our strategy is the provision of accessible, culturally sensitive therapeutic support in our clients’ mother tongue whenever possible. By offering services in the native language of our clients, we ensure that the therapy and psychosocial support we provide is effective but also respectful of their identities and experiences.
This dual support structure allows clients to participate actively in legal decisions and testify, while their well-being is safeguarded – it is a holistic approach that is conducive to therapeutic justice. We recognize that healing from trauma related to human rights violations, requires more than legal redress. Our goal is to provide a path to healing that includes both legal justice and personal recovery.