Vergadering Commissie voor de Rechten van Het Kind vandaag geopend

UNITED NATIONS Press Release
Committee on the Rights of the Child
14 September 2009

The Committee on the Rights of the Child this morning opened it fifty-second session, adopting its agenda and programme of work and hearing an address from Ibrahim Salama, Chief of the Human Rights Treaties Branch of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Opening the meeting, Yanghee Lee, the Committee Chairperson, said that the world had witnessed one of the worst situations in the form of the financial crisis and that it was now witnessing another crisis in the form of the A/H1N1 flu. This was an alarming situation, especially as the first cases of resistance to the anti-viral had been reported. The Committee hoped that children living in all parts of the world would be provided with adequate treatment.

Mr. Salama, in opening remarks, said that during the eleventh session of the Human Rights Council two resolutions of particular importance and relevance to the Committee had been adopted. Council resolution 11/1 provided for the establishment of an Open-ended Working Group which would explore the possibility of elaborating an Optional Protocol to the Convention to provide a communications procedure complementary to the reporting procedure under the Convention. In Resolution 11/7 on the Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children, the Council welcomed the accomplishment of the Guidelines and their intention to enhance the implementation of the Convention and decided to submit the Guidelines to the General Assembly for consideration, with a view to their adoption on the twentieth anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Turning to the upcoming celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the adoption of the Convention, Mr. Salama said that the event was scheduled to take place on 8 and 9 October 2009 in Geneva and had already attracted considerable interest among States parties, civil society organizations and others. The Committee had chosen ”Dignity, Development and Dialogue” to be core themes for the event as these highlighted three main challenges to the implementation of the Convention. In relation to the harmonisation of working methods, Mr. Salama said that members of the different treaty bodies had met in Geneva for the ninth Inter-Committee Meeting this June. The issue of streamlining and strengthening the treaty bodies system was high on the agenda of the High-Commissioner, he added.

At the end of the meeting, Committee Secretary Maja Andrijasevic-Boko announced that the Committee had received 17 reports under the Convention and 4 under the Optional Protocols since its last session.