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Laura Theytaz-Bergman, 45, was coordinator for the NGO Group on the Convention on the Rights of the Child from 1992 until 2007. She now lives in Singapore and still acts as a consultant to the NGO Group and other child rights organisations. Early this year she authored the report What Happened? A study on the impact of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in five countries: Estonia, Nepal, Peru, Uganda and Yemen, published by Save the Children Sweden. After the adoption of the Convention, pretty much no one knew where we were going and what we were going to do. It was a confusing time. When I became involved there was the sense that a lot of energy had gone into drafting, but what do we do now? Both the political and technological environment was so different to how it is now. It was very difficult to communicate outside of Geneva – there was no email, no internet, so we used fax and post. It's hard to imagine now. NGOs operate very differently today, and the Convention made a huge difference to the involvement of human rights NGOs. NGOs were previously perceived as anti-government, and the Cold War environment meant that they were often viewed with suspicion. The drafting process showed that NGOs could be worked with and that there could be collaboration. At the time, the base for the NGO Group already existed because NGOs had been brought together for the drafting process. They came from all walks of life – there were women's organisations, religions organisations, as well as the traditional human rights organisations. It was really thanks to Save the Children Sweden and Defence for Children International that work began on implementation of the Convention, rather than just the drafting. We knew that we had to sure the Committee was getting additional information because we knew that the State party reports were incomplete. The challenge for us was: How do we tap into what is happening nationally? And that's still a challenge today. Don't forget this was all pre-email, so getting hold of the major players at national level was a real challenge. The UN can be a daunting place, and we wanted to make sure it was comfortable for national NGOs to come to. I keep mentioning technology, but it really was so different. We were photocopying State party reports and posting them back to national NGOs. All of this work was very innovative, and we now take a lot of it for granted. If you speak with some of the NGOs that work with treaty bodies that have been around for a long time, they will tell you that it is a real challenge getting them to work differently and be inclusive. I will never forget the headline in a major UK national newspaper. It said: “How dare they?” They were asking, how can people in the Philippines or in Brazil criticise us about child rights when you look at what is in going on in their countries? How dare they criticise us? I don't think you would ever see that headline now. You even say it today with reporting for the Optional Protocols. States signed up to the one on armed conflict thinking they were fine, because they weren't involved in any armed conflicts. But then the Committee started asking about states of emergency, or refugees who had come from armed conflict situations, or ages for enlistment in the armed forces, and States start realising it applies to them after all. They are blown away.
Everything that we take for granted now has been built up piece by piece. Thankfully at the beginning the Committee was very dynamic and supported the involvement of NGOs. It was groundbreaking to have NGOs participating in pre-sessions, given that NGO involvement before had been quite limited. People were like 'wow'!
The CRC revolutionised the involvement of NGOs in UN processes. Before we had basically Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International submitting reports to Geneva, but this was cut off from any voices from the national level. We approached it in a completely different manner. We never stuck a logo on reports done by someone national level, and it was important to get national NGOs involved in the process and actually present in Geneva.
I really think we have come a long, long way in the last 20 years. Sometimes I don't think we give ourselves enough credit. Every government used to come before the Committee and say “children are the future” - now you hardly see any governments do that because the Convention has helped people to see that children are the present and not just the future. That's an enormous achievement in itself. Implementation is a very difficult thing to accomplish, but of course there is still so much more that has to be done. It has to be looked at as a long term plan, not just 20 years but a lot longer.
In the early days, a lot of the developed countries signed up to the Convention and thought “we're doing pretty good. We don't have any armed conflict, or street children, or even child prostitutes.” And so they were shocked when the Committee started asking them about violence, or about abuse, or bullying in schools. They thought everything was fine and dandy, so there was lots of education to be done.