You have been entrusted to help run your country and make important decisions that impact heavily on the lives of others. This power comes with steep obligations. By promoting and protecting human rights, you have the power to ensure people enjoy quality of life and can live in an equal society with respect and dignity.
Children are some of the world’s most vulnerable people. You are in a significantly privileged position to ensure their rights are protected and promoted. If you feel something is wrong - whether a new law, a budget plan or something else - you are in a strong position to challenge it.
You also have obligations to ensure decisions you make as a parliamentarian do not violate international law, particularly human rights treaties, including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
We want a world where governments and societies view and treat children as rights holders - not simply as “the future” in need of protection and charity, or merely an extension of their parents. We want to work with parliamentarians to achieve this goal. Please email us for further information and advice, or to give us feedback on our work and how we can better help you protect and promote children’s rights.
Resources for you
We have also produced a guide to applying a rights based approach to children for parliamentarians. A rights based approach comes from the notion that children are rights holders, and that for real change to happen the focus must be on promoting and protecting their rights - not just treating them as objects of charity. The guide for parliamentarians emphasises that a parliament has many functions that it can use to shape the laws, policies and institutions of a country for the full realisation of all children’s rights. It is not designed to tell you how to do your job, but rather to give you the tools to understand how children’s rights fit into it.
Below are some additional children’s rights resources tailored to parliamentarians. We are developing more all the time, and updating and adding to existing resources. Please email us with your feedback on these, as well as suggestions for further resources we could look to produce.
- Council of Europe's guide for parliamentarians to visiting places where children are deprived of their liberty for immigration purposes, by providing information about how to plan such a visit, including useful guidance and checklists.
- The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) is the international organisation of Parliaments, and is the focal point for world-wide parliamentary dialogue. It works for peace and co-operation among peoples and for the firm establishment of representative democracy. It holds regular meetings for parliamentarians and has a host of handbooks and other resources on its.