UNBA to participate in developing HELP course on Convention for the Protection of the Profession of Lawyer

The legal community needs a systematic educational product that comprehensively reveals the mechanisms for implementing the rights and guarantees provided for in the Convention for the Protection of the Profession of Lawyer.

This was emphasized by Hanna Udovenko, a leading expert on European integration at the Ukrainian National Bar Association, during a seminar organized by the Council of Europe's Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (HELP) program «EU contact points: digital transformation of human rights education and strategic priorities for the EU», which took place on February 19-20 in Strasbourg (France).

The event, organized as part of the joint EU and Council of Europe project «HELP in the EU IV», brought together representatives of national institutions for the training of judges, prosecutors, and advocates from EU member states, as well as key partners of the HELP network.

Seminar participants considered the directions for the development of the HELP Program, new initiatives, training needs, the integration of ECHR practice into legal training programs, the development and improvement of e-learning courses, the methodology of online, hybrid, and face-to-face learning, and discussed the planning of training activities for 2026-2027.

During the discussion of new subjects, H. Udovenko drew attention to the need to develop a separate specialized course dedicated to the Convention for the Protection of the Profession of Lawyer. In this regard, she recalled that one of the developers of the Convention (the draft was prepared by the CJ-AV Committee) was the Vice President of the UNBA, BCU Valentin Gvozdiy. The process of signing this international agreement has been launched in Ukraine, so the Ukrainian advocacy community is ready to join the work on developing a corresponding course to strengthen institutional guarantees of the independence of the advocacy community.

«The active participation of the Ukrainian side in the development of the HELP network is a logical continuation of the large-scale work being carried out in Ukraine in cooperation with the Council of Europe Office, - commented H. Udovenko on the initiative. - After all, the UNBA considers participation in the HELP Program to be a strategic direction for the development of advocacy, strengthening the professional capacity of advocates, ensuring a unified understanding of European standards, improving the quality of legal aid, and promoting the integration of the Ukrainian bar into the European legal space».

For reference: Ukraine ranks first among the 46 member states of the Council of Europe in terms of the number of users of the HELP Platform. Forty-five HELP courses have been translated into Ukrainian and posted on the HELP Platform. In 2025, the number of users increased by 33% — from 18,800 to 25,132.

The Council of Europe's HELP program is the Council of Europe's main educational initiative for lawyers and aims to improve the skills of judges, prosecutors, advocates, and other legal professionals in the application of the European Convention on Human Rights, the practice of the European Court of Human Rights, the European Social Charter and European Union law.

In Ukraine, the program is implemented within the framework of the project «HELP for Ukraine, including during the war», whose partner is the Higher School of Advocacy of the UNBA. In recent years, the program has trained more than 200 certified HELP tutors, including advocates and trainers from the Higher School of Advocacy.

HELP courses, available in Ukrainian, are officially accredited for advocates in Ukraine. A certificate of completion of a course on the HELP Platform provides advocates with 2 credit hours of professional development for each completed course.