Submitted by crinadmin on
Gerison Lansdown, 59, is an international child rights advocate based in the UK. She is currently working on a handbook to bring the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Convention on the Rights of the Child together as an advocacy tool – the handbook will be published later this year. She has just finished preparing the General Comment on Article 12 which will be adopted by the Committee on the Rights of the Child during its next session. She is working on a partner toolkit for governments and policy makers on how to implement the General Comment. Gerison is also the co-Director of CRED PRO which develops core education programmes for professionals working with children. I suppose my work in child rights started many eons ago when I was working as a social worker with children in Yorkshire and Liverpool. I always felt a sense of frustration that things were never going to change by working with individuals. You need to change the systems that create injustices. If you are going to create change, there are two strategies: First, to change laws and policies, working from the top down; the second is to look at what strengths people – teachers, policy makers, etc - already have and engage with them in terms of what they want and what their aspirations are. We need to invest more energy in working with them, not against them, to get commitment to change. Human rights tends to tackle things from a top down approach and development from a bottom up approach: we need to marry up the two to create a rights based approach to development. The most solid changes I have achieved are in strengthening the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the reporting process, for example, in 1997 I got the Committee to hold a Day of General Discussion on the rights of children with disabilities which led to the General Comment on the rights of children with disabilities. It is difficult in child rights to actually see the concrete changes you have contributed to; if you work as a teacher, for example, you see children learn and develop and begin to discover things, but child rights work is long term, so it is nice to be able to see some solid changes. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognises the humanity and equality of persons with disabilities in a way that has not been done before. The very process was transforming. It was achieved in large part as a consequence of the advocacy of persons with disabilities themselves. You could watch the language change there at the UN and it began to be ordinary for people with disabilities to be involved and to lead with their expertise. We will need to wait and see how the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities [which has yet to be elected] will work together to address these issues. Governments may start ratifying to be in the bidding to get someone onto the Committee. Violence against children with disabilities is an issue that never gets raised in the Committee on the Rights of the Child, but it needs specific strategies for prevention. In some cases it may be more appropriate to include issues concerning children with disabilities in government reporting to the CRC so strategies are integrated with overall strategies for children. Peter Newell is the child rights advocate I most admire. He is unrelenting, innovative and focused. He is utterly dedicated to achieving change. I would sum up child rights with the word dignity.