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<!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } A:link { so-language: zxx } --Edmund Foley, 33, is the Legal Officer at the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA), based in Gambia, where he is responsible for children's rights. He also represents IHRDA on the organising committee of the Forum on the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. I first started working on children's rights at the IHRDA in 2007 when I was asked to work on one of the first communications to the African Committee on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. The communication, which has not yet been examined, concerns Nubian children to whom the government of Kenya has denied nationality. It was around this time that I attended the 10th session of the African Committee and the Africa Fit for Children session. My daily work involves researching cases to take to the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, for example, I'm currently working on the case of forced eviction of communities in Abuja, Nigeria. I also spend time following up on issues that arise from the sessions of the African Committee and discussing them with other NGOs. I participate in two other networks: I'm the focal point for the Network of African National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs), based in Kenya. There are about 31 NHRIs in Africa at the moment (http://www.nanhri.org). And I'm a member of the Coalition for an Effective African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights. The African Committee on the Rights and Welfare of the Child has standing before the future merged Court, so when the Committee starts examining communications, if States do not comply with the recommendations made, the case can be referred to the Court which can issue legally binding decisions. We wanted to test the Committee's communication mechanism. I also draw a lot of inspiration from the communications mechanism of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, and one of the reasons we decided on the case of Nubian children was that the Commission had already examined a communication on Nubian adults. We are basing our communication on article 3 of the Charter (the right to non-discrimination) and article 6 (the right to a name and nationality). What is my biggest achievement?! To give you some background, when I joined the Institute, I was blank on child rights issues. I used to work for the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative's Africa Office and I dealt with just one case involving a child. It concerned a report about a minister accused of corruption which displayed the photo of the minister's child, and we campaigned to stop the report's publication. I had been to sessions of the African Commission many times before, but when I attended the African Committee session for the very first time, I noticed that there were very few representatives from civil society organisations. Someone from Save the Children and from the African Child Policy Forum, who were also there, noticed the same thing. That was where the idea to build partnerships with civil society organisations around the African Charter – and this forum – began. This is something I am very proud of. The African Charter has progressive provisions. The problem is that it is not widely known. I'll give you an example. During the Africa Fit for Children session, the African Union (AU) sent out questionnaires on children's rights to all Member States and got just 28 responses. The reason for this in many cases was that the AU sent the questionnaire to the wrong government department – the AU does not have a good understanding of issues affecting children in Africa. Having said that, when we have held regional workshops on the Charter, representation has been quite broad and people are eager to know more. The best thing about the African Charter is that it is Africa specific. It also addresses the issue of the welfare of the child. This was hard for me to understand at first – as a lawyer I thought to myself, how is it possible to litigate for the welfare of the child? The concept was explained to me by ANPPCAN - Kenya and I realised that provisions in legal documents do not need to be resolved through litigation and the concept of welfare means the Charter is much broader and conceptualises all the things that children need, for example, article 11 on the right to education which has provisions for female, gifted and disadvantaged children. I also think that the fact that the Charter addresses duties as well as rights gives a more balanced view of human rights. The Charter's strengths are also its weaknesses. It can be difficult to find something concrete to hold onto in some of the provisions, for example, how do you measure if parents are being responsible and how do you hold the State accountable where they are not? If I could give one piece of advice to child rights organisations in the region it would to say they need to see child rights as enforceable. Many organisations do a lot of advocacy work around policies on children's rights. The next step is to conceptualise how to develop and bring cases to court where these policies are not implemented. Organisations need to think along both lines. There also needs to be more education around the African Charter and Committee. I see a lot of the same faces cropping up at meetings, so the training needs to start with these organisations first. If I were to sum up child rights in one word, I word say “Being” - I have a son who is one year and three months old and this is the word that comes to me when I think of him.