Submitted by crinadmin on
In the last few years there has been a significant improvement in the development of adequate legislation and policies that has strengthened children’s rights in Europe. Furthermore, both reports by states and alternative reports from the civil society to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child have contributed to a better understanding of children’s situation in Europe. Yet, much remains to be done to ensure that changes at national levels transpire down to local levels in order to result in actual changes in the daily lives of children. Save the Children Sweden is of the opinion that the UN reporting process has to be complemented with more extensive and continuous monitoring of children’s rights on national, regional and local levels. With increased decentralisation in Europe a greater amount of decision are taken at municipality levels that affect the every-day-lives of children. This leads to that local monitoring will become increasingly important in order to assess the impact on children’s rights. Consideration must therefore be given as to how countries successfully can approach local child rights monitoring in a strategic and sustainable manner. It is not the intention of this pre-study to find ‘good models’ of how local child rights monitoring could best be implemented, nor to use experiences from individual countries to make conclusions at a European level. Instead this prestudy hopes to bring to attention the diversity of experiences in this field in order to inspire a debate and discussion regarding how to ensure a strategic and holistic approach to local child rights monitoring. Such a discussion shall give due consideration to various factors such as central, regional and local actors, existing monitoring structures and national specifics. At the same time, this discussion would benefit from a debate at a European level, where regional actors such as the EU and the Council of Europe could contribute with arenas to carry these issues further into concrete actions.