Child Rights Impact Assessment (CRIA) is one in a toolbox of strategies to help ensure children are considered and good outcomes supported in decisions that affect them. It does not replace a general responsibility to informally, and in all actions, give effect to the universal, human rights of children. This is a duty of governments, who have a higher standard as parties to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Some governments including Wales and Scotland have gone some way to encode this general duty in domestic law.
Other complementary governance mechanisms to advance the well-being and rights of children have been identified by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (it is beyond the scope of this Community of Practice to provide support for these mechanisms, each of which could benefit from its own dedicated community). These “General Measures of Implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child” are governance processes and mechanisms to embed consideration of the rights of children in the routine work and consideration of governments, as required in article 4 of the Convention (“all appropriate legislative, administrative and other measures for the implementation of the rights”). Like the Convention rights, they are mutually supportive and interdependent. They include:
- Plans and strategies for children
- Coordinating mechanisms
- Law reform and judicial enforcement
- Child rights impact assessment (law, policy, administrative decisions)
- Awareness-raising, training and education
- Resource allocation and “making children visible in budgets”
- Monitoring and data-collection
- Statutory children’s rights institutions (e.g., Children’s Commissioners)
- Participation of civil society
- International cooperation
- Ratification and application of other relevant international standards
Consider also:
- Children’s Charters and Guiding Principles
- Child Rights and Business Principles and Tools (see also http://www.unicef.org/csr/tools.htm)
- Including a focus on children in other types of impact assessment (e.g. health and privacy impact assessment)