What does the UN do on children’s rights?
A lot of discussions take place at the UN and a lot of documents are produced. Some of them can be very helpful for advocates working to promote and protect children’s rights around the world. But they can be difficult to find, and then even harder to understand and use.
This section of our website explains what we monitor, how and why, and contains links to where you can find the results. For more information about the UN - what it is and how it works - read our guide to the UN. Regional human rights mechanisms also produce material developing children’s rights and we are currently looking at ways to incorporate these into our monitoring work. In the meantime you can visit our guide to regional children’s rights mechanisms for more on what they do.
The UN - what we monitor and how
We do our best to monitor all significant children’s rights developments across the UN, and then share our findings and insights. Since information is power, we believe in providing it for free in a way people can access easily. We promote the use of plain language, and try to decipher the jargon that so often creeps into human rights documentation.
Our monitoring work is the first step to advancing children’s rights on the international stage. It helps us spot trends and see which issues are - or most importantly are not - being addressed. We then conduct detailed research which feeds into our policy, advocacy and campaigns work.
You can use the CRIN library to search for all this information for free. We have dedicated country pages listing key extracts for children’s rights from UN treaty bodies, special procedures and the Universal Periodic Review. We also have a specific section for the Committee on the Rights of the Child documentation, which we upload in collaboration with Child Rights Connect.
We upload all UN resolutions that look at children’s rights, as well as general comments, reports from Days of General Discussion, complaints and decisions by treaty bodies, and much more. Read our UN guide or see our A-Z for more on what these terms mean.
But it’s not just what the UN says that counts. Often the reports provided by civil society (called alternative reports) are the most interesting because they say what is really going on.
In addition to making all this information freely available and searchable on our website, we produce a monthly CRINmail where we explain some of the key children’s rights developments at the UN, and let readers know about upcoming advocacy deadlines.
To keep up to date with this information subscribe to the Children's Rights at the UN CRINmail.