Children's Rights-based Indicators: Strengthening States’ Accountability to Children

This open access volume provides the first-ever comprehensive framework of indicators to measure progress in the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It analyses the development of thinking in the field of children’s rights on the significance of monitoring, and compiles a set of structural, process and outcome (SPO) aspects of children’s human rights-based indicators, for each article in the Convention. It draws on existing measures wherever possible, and involves wide-ranging consultation with experts in the field, along with 2000 children from 35 countries around the globe. This volume provides guidance on the implementation of children’s rights which will be of value to, among others, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, governments, policy-makers, advocates, and academics. The potential to measure the actions of governments in meeting the obligations they signed up to in the Convention provides an important contribution towards accountability to children. The indicators and associated analysis can serve as both guidance on what needs to happen to ensure the realisation of children’s rights and a benchmark against which to assess the impact of government action.

This is an open access book.

Ziba Vaghri is Associate Professor and holds a prestigious research chair in Child Rights and Child Development at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. Ziba is the Principal Investigator of the GlobalChild project, tan international project that resulted in the development of the indicators published in this book. She has over 20 years of extensive research and international experience in the areas of child development, child rights, and child nutrition, with a strong emphasis on the social determinants of health. She is the recipient of the 2014 Scholar Award from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research in Canada and has led many large international projects to their fruitful completion. In 2014, Ziba was recruited by the World Health Organization (WHO) a fixed-term appointment (2014-2015) as the Early Child Development Technical Officer at WHO-HQ in Geneva. Ziba led the international team that developed the Early Childhood Rights Indicators, ECRI (also known as indicators of GC7), a child rights monitoring tool for young children (0-8 years), which was developed based on the General Comment 7 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) under the auspices of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. Her publication and program of research focuses on the ways to facilitate the implementation and monitoring of the CRC. Her unique program of research is grounded on her strong conviction that the fulfilment of the rights of children- as articulated under the CRC- will contribute to the improvements in the developmental outcomes of childhood. Ziba is also the lead author of Monitoring State Compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Roberta Ruggiero is the Director of the Children’s Rights Academy at the University of Geneva’s Centre for Children’s Rights Studies (CCRS) and Academic Coordinator of the Children’s Rights European Academic Network (CREAN). She holds an MA in law, an MA in human rights and democratization from the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratization (EIUC), and a PhD in children’s rights promotion and protection awarded by the University of Molise. Formerly, she was the scientific coordinator of the European Network of National Observatories on Childhood (ChildONEurope) based at the Instituto degli Innocenti (2008-2013). She was also a senior lecturer at the University of Padua, and an external professor of children’s rights at the University of Molise, as well as a researcher at the International Organization for Migration (Europe Office) and at the UNICEF-Innocenti Research Office. Her publications and research interests include independent human rights institutions for children, children’s rights implementation, comparative childhood governmental policies, the status of parenthood in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and children’s rights approaches to evidence-based policy. She is a member of the Council of the Terre des hommes Foundation (Tdh), Lausanne, Switzerland and of the Council of the Foundation of the  Child Rights Institute (Institut International des Droits de l'Enfant - IDE), Sion, Switzerland.

Gerison Lansdown is the former founder director (1992-2000), of the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, and, over the past 20 years, has worked as an international children’s rights consultant and advocate, publishing and lecturing widely on the subject of children’s rights, including on children’s participation, evolving capacities, and strengthening human rights institutions for children. She has worked with the Committee on the Rights of the Child in the development of several General Comments, including on Articles 12 and 31, the rights of children during adolescence and on the rights of children in the digital environment. She was actively involved in the development of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and in the drafting of the General Comment on inclusive education. She has Honorary Doctorates from the Open University UK; Carleton University, Canada; and the University of East London, and an Honorary Fellowship from the University of Central Lancashire. She was Vice Chair of UNICEF-UK for 9 years, and is currently on the editorial advisory board of the Canadian Journal of Children’s Rights, and is Chair of the ODI GAGE programme.