About CRC Implementation Handbook

Dear Colleagues,

Here are a few ideas to contribute to this important debate.

The CRC Implementation Handbook is a good example of a detailed commendatory for each article of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
It makes a legal text accessible to non-lawyers.

The work Katarina Tomasevski did together with UNESCO (and others: SIDA,
UNICEF...) on the Right to Education shows the benefits of close collaboration between a lawyer and Special Rapporteur on the right to education on the one hand, and technical agencies in the field of education on the other. There is a rapidly growing body of such literature on human rights-based approaches to a wide range of development issues. The next step is to link these documents to political processes to disseminate the documents and to turn them into greater government commitments (e.g. MDG, EFA, WFFC...). Without such processes the documents often end up being little more than reference documents.

The publications of the Inter-Parliamentary Union are good examples of operationalising human rights for a particular audience. These publications are collaborative efforts by the IPU and other agencies - depending on the topic (e.g. Red Cross and UNV on volunteering, UNHCR on statelessness, UNICEF on child protection).

The CRC Committee is supporting the development of a General Comment on Article 12 of the CRC (children’s' right to expression). Last September a day of discussion was held in Geneva that brought together many different views and experiences (including those of children) on the topic. A consultant is now preparing a draft of the General Comment.

One particular area where children's civil rights have been operationalised is birth registration. Birth registration and civil registration are being promoted through a global campaign by UNICEF and Plan International (and others).

I am currently involved in an initiative to operationalise children's civil rights. This has grown out of the work on children's participation and is an attempt to convince governments to do more to promote children's civil rights and citizenship. We are in the process of defining a clear agenda that speaks to politicians. The effectiveness of this initiative will depend on the success of building a broad-based movement for children's civil rights.

Operationalising human rights principles and standards is one particular approach to mainstreaming human rights in development. There are two other overlapping) approaches: incorporating human rights principles (accountability, participation, universality and non-discrimination, indivisibility) in the programme cycle from analysis to planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. The UNDAF process is an example of how this is being done. NGOs, such as Save the Children and CARE have developed similar approaches. On its own, this is probably the least effective way to promote human rights in development: a) because it focuses on human rights principles and not on human rights standards, and b) because it does not search for new ways to challenge existing power structures. A third way to promote human rights in development is the use of 'new' methods in development programming, such as: access to justice, right to information, social auditing, participatory budgeting, public interest litigation, independent human rights mechanisms etc. to challenge systematic injustices and inequality.

Hope these thoughts are useful.

Best,
Joachim