Submitted by crinadmin on
From being sentenced to death and life imprisonment, to suffering repression for participating in protests - if the past year has shown us anything, it is that children continue to suffer a wide variety of rights violations across the world. In this context, CRIN continued to identify persistent as well as new and neglected children's rights violations as targets for monitoring and campaigning. With the support of our members, we have remained vigilant for information on children's rights violations as they have appeared in the news. Using our mailing lists, website and social media, we have brought major issues to the attention of the global child rights community and helped propagate expertise, good practice and the sharing of resources. Through our campaign work, we have reported on and challenged ongoing violations and systemic problems, such as the lack of transparency in international organisations and the disgraceful continued inhuman sentencing of children. Building on our previous work, we continue to act as a vital source of information on children's rights around the world and a major focus for political and social activism by a global network of activists. But in the past year we also turned our attention to developing and supporting stronger forms of advocacy. This is of particular importance because our research shows that children's rights advocacy is not advancing quickly enough and that while traditional and softer forms of campaigning are important, they are not having sufficient impact. In view of this, CRIN has been moving towards a new stage in our work; one which explores how we can most usefully support national level campaigns and encourage the use of stronger forms of advocacy – including legal action – to challenge violations of children's rights. CRIN's work in 2011/12 was the first step towards this goal, but we hope that it will set the stage for collective action within the children's rights movement. Indeed, at the core of our mission as a children's rights organisation is our resolve to pursue advocacy that enacts change. Fruit of this objective is our new advocacy tool: the “Children's Rights Wiki”. Its purpose is to build a clearer picture of the violations of children's rights that persist in a given country, with the eventual goal of matching these abuses with the available mechanisms as possible avenues of redress. With the new Wiki, we not only seek to inspire collective action in this direction – an ambition we put to the test with a pilot project with partners in Turkey – but also to develop CRIN's role in supporting strong and effective advocacy globally. Download our 2011/12 annual report by clicking on the link above.