Guided by our passion for social and legal change, Child Rights International Network (CRIN) is building a global network for children's rights. We press for rights, not charity, and advocate for a genuine systemic shift in how governments and societies view children. Our inspiration is the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which we use to bring children's rights to the top of the international agenda. We launch advocacy campaigns, work as part of international coalitions, and strive to make existing human rights enforcement mechanisms accessible for all.
In recent years, CRIN has been moving from being an information network towards becoming a network focussed more clearly on supporting children’s rights advocacy. Up to now this has largely been achieved through providing more advocacy-focussed materials, targeting CRIN’s output towards those in a position to pursue active advocacy and launching some specific petitions and campaigns through our website.
It is very clear from the CRC reporting procedure and from many reports by NGOs, human rights institutions, UN agencies and others that serious violations of a wide variety of children’s rights persist in most states in all regions. It is also clear that traditional forms of advocacy – situation analysis, report writing, lobbying of governments and parliaments, use of the media, briefing of human rights mechanisms, etc. – are not having sufficient impact in many states on many serious violations. For example, successive concluding observations on states’ reports from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child have failed to provoke necessary legal reforms and other government action.
In light of this, CRIN and partners began facilitating a series of national and regional workshops to explore how CRIN can most usefully support national level campaigns and encourage the use of stronger forms of advocacy - including legal action and advocacy - to challenge violations of children’s rights. In particular, we want to encourage those involved (or potentially involved) in children’s rights advocacy to review persistent serious violations and consider all possible forms of advocacy, including legal action and advocacy, to challenge them. We believe a systematic process like this is needed in most states, but has as yet only been pursued in few.
We believe in working openly and freely sharing resources. This note is a starting point for sharing our experiences and resources from running these workshops with others thinking about organising their own legal advocacy workshops. Our plan is to produce a global legal advocacy guide along with a toolkit in the future to further support others in running similar workshops without our direct involvement.