Submitted by crinadmin on
In the course of 2007, the CRIN network expanded to include nearly 2,000 member organisations based in 150 countries. Over the last decade, CRIN has built up a core set of services based on members' need for accurate, up-to-date child rights information to support their work. CRIN’s goals for 2007 were to sharpen the quality and focus of core information services and to develop advocacy capacity with two aims in mind: to equip members with the tools they need to advocate more effectively for child rights and to influence the international child rights agenda. Significant developments included a website makeover, the production of a child rights legal guide and the launch of international advocacy activities undertaken with partners. CRIN has taken a more proactive approach in choosing the issues it tackles in its core information services. The aim is to offer alternative perspectives on ongoing issues to reflect the interests of members and to address new and neglected areas of child rights. Focus areas in 2007 included coverage of negotiations on the new UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, work on non-discrimination and religion, and the production of a media toolkit. In addition, CRIN has continued to report on and support the participation of child rights advocates in relevant UN and regional human rights processes, such as the follow up to the UN Special Session on Children. Efforts to support members’ advocacy work centred around the development of a new legal guide and database, the first phase of which was completed in 2007. The primary goal is to ensure that those people who can best use relevant child rights laws, to effect change in communities and elsewhere, know what laws exist and know how they can be used. The project was developed in response to increasing enquiries from members seeking information about which national and international law obligations had been entered into by their States, and about how these obligations could be enforced. CRIN’s development has been fuelled through ever-widening partnerships with key players in the child rights arena, including international NGOs, ombudspersons for children, the NGO Group for the Convention on the Rights of the Child and UNICEF. CRIN teamed up with a number of other child rights actors in 2007 on two advocacy initiatives aimed at influencing global child rights issues: to follow up the recommendations of the Violence Study and to create a complaints mechanism under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. CRIN plans to provide further support to members’ advocacy work in 2008, for example by encouraging child rights advocates to contribute information to the Human Rights Council’s new Universal Periodic Review mechanism, among other initiatives.