Expert legal commentary: Children and human rights abuses: coming to an international stage?

Associate Professor
Paula Gerber

By Associate Professor Paula Gerber
Lecturer, Faculty of Law, Monash University

For the first time, children will soon be able to bring complaints of human rights violations to the United Nations. Although the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child has been in operation since 1990, there has not been a mechanism for children to bring a complaint that a government is breaching their rights until now.

This is in stark contrast to the UN’s other major human rights treaties, all of which have a process for people to bring allegations of human rights abuses.

In December 2011, the UN sought to rectify this omission by adopting an Optional Protocol to the convention. This sets up a system for children to bring a complaint to the committee, made up of 18 independent, international child rights experts. The Optional Protocol enters into force three months after the tenth country ratifies it and, on January 14, Costa Rica did just that.

Read the full commentary on The Conversation where this article was first published.