Local governments are essential to promote, fulfill, and respect human rights due to their proximity to citizens and their presence at the community level. Thanks to this closeness, they have the ability to mobilize civil society, understand its needs, and work to ensure that rights are guaranteed.
Likewise, local governments have competencies—either exclusive or shared with other levels of government—that allow them to directly ensure these rights (education, environment, urban planning, housing, public space, culture, etc.). Through culture, sports, and education, as well as the construction of collective memory, we can bring society together and promote human rights for all citizens.
Therefore, we have both the responsibility and the competencies to offer public services that help us move toward a model of sustainable and socially inclusive cities that promote equality and combat discrimination, through the protection and promotion of human rights.
Proximity to citizens facilitates participation in defining shared city strategies that allow us to move toward more sustainable and inclusive territories. In Granollers, we launched a co-creation process to develop, implement, and evaluate the Granollers 2030 Strategic Plan, which defines the city’s strategy for the coming years. This plan established 3 missions and 15 key milestones that address three interconnected areas: the health of the environment and the planet, providing people with opportunities to develop their life projects, and leaving no one behind by guaranteeing their well-being and rights.
These missions are based on the principles of equity, social justice, democracy, and sustainability in its three dimensions (economic, social, and environmental) and, consequently, on human rights, which serve as the guiding framework for Granollers’ strategic action.
To fulfill these commitments, comprehensive projects are being promoted, aligned with human rights, and, where possible, incorporating an innovative component to tackle global challenges from a local perspective.
Moreover, as a signatory city of the European Charter for the Safeguarding of Human Rights in the City, Granollers applies the human rights vision across all its programs. Civic programs, promotion of coexistence, and community mediation. Global justice education, community mediation. Applying responsible public procurement guidelines. Ensuring transparency in public action. Also in the field of education, through the educating cities approach, where education goes beyond school walls to infuse the entire city. Through urban planning that promotes interaction and coexistence, with safe and accessible public spaces, and by bringing public facilities closer to all neighborhoods. By promoting culture, understood as a fundamental right and a common good.
In this way, human rights provide a necessary and practical framework for moving toward a sustainable and inclusive city model.
For Granollers, joining the campaign is a natural step forward in advancing our city’s commitment to respecting and promoting human rights. We also see it as a responsibility to strengthen alliances among governments that promote human rights.
The institutionalization of this commitment helps to disseminate these practices in other contexts and at different levels of government. Likewise, it is an opportunity to give value to our city’s determination to contribute to the fulfillment and promotion of human rights and peace. Being one of the first actors to sign the campaign allows us to give visibility to our commitment, to encourage other municipalities to take the same step, and to make citizens feel involved in it.
Education, culture, and sports are tools for social cohesion that promote a culture of peace and respect for human rights. In Granollers, historical memory is the starting point, a key element to promote a culture of peace and strengthen democracy. The memory of the bombing suffered by the city during the Spanish Civil War has led us to build a peace city project, ranging from community work to international cooperation projects. Special emphasis is placed on education and the recovery of the memories of the people who live in the city to create cohesion, a sense of belonging, and contribute to understanding among cultures. Memories of wartime, dictatorship, anti-Franco struggle, factory work, or the memories of the many people who came from different territories and have made Granollers their home.
Granollers is part of the project “Human Rights Defender Cities”, alongside 28 other municipalities and 9 organizations committed to the defense and promotion of human rights. Since 2013, the program has organized annual activities to raise awareness of activists' work and to inform the public about the importance of defending human rights and supporting these causes internationally.
Since 2008, the global justice education program “Granollers, City for Peace” (themes: memory and rights education), led by the Peace Culture Center, has also adopted a human rights perspective and covers all stages of education (primary, secondary, and upper secondary). It ensures that all children and young people enrolled in schools across the city participate, at each educational stage, in at least one activity related to global justice education with a human rights approach.
In this line, in 2025, the international project “Leading Youth Towards Democracy” was launched: eight young people from Granollers took part in an exchange with peers from the cities of Ypres (Belgium) and Dunkirk (France) to reflect on memory, democracy, and European integration.
On another front, Mayors for Peace (themes: peace culture) is a network of cities working with institutions and civil society to foster a culture of peace, promote disarmament, and, in particular, eliminate nuclear weapons. Promoting peaceful and inclusive societies leads to significant changes in the values, attitudes, and behaviors of citizens, highlighting the importance of human rights, rejection of violence, and the embrace of principles such as democracy, solidarity, social justice, and interculturality. Granollers leads the Catalan and European networks, promoting alliances for peace.
As part of this network, a young person from Granollers (the fifth so far) traveled to Hiroshima to participate in a conference bringing together youth from around the world to reflect on the atomic bombings the Japanese city suffered during World War II, and on how to work together to promote world peace.
Finally, in 2025, within the framework of the Catalan Forum for Peace, Granollers, as the coordinating city of the Mayors for Peace Network, led—together with the Catalan Fund for Development Cooperation and the Barcelona Provincial Council—a project to identify local policies contributing to peacebuilding. Some examples of these actions included: promoting campaigns against hate speech, creating early detection networks and response protocols for situations of discrimination and violence, strengthening services for migrants and community mediation, integrating a “peace” perspective in urban and cultural projects, promoting international cooperation, and rethinking security services.
This Forum, and the process surrounding it, exemplify the strengthening of institutional collaboration and the key role of local governments in public policies for peace, coexistence, and external action. At the same time, it highlights how this represents an opportunity for coherence and integration in local policies.