For more than 10 years the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (the committee) has provided their support for our work on improving the accountability to children through creating child rights indicators, which commenced with Indicators of General Comment 7. Please read the letters of support from different chairpersons of the committee over the period of 2006 to present below.
On Nov. 22, 2019, Honorable Jean Zermatten (the former chair of the UN Committee and Chair of the GlobalChild Steering Committee) and Dr. Ziba Vaghri (the Director of the GlobalChild program) met with the UN CRC Committee and provided a progress report. Subsequent to this presentation, Mr. Luis Ernesto Pedernera Reyna, Chairperson of the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Rights of the Child (2019-2021), issued a letter conveying the continued support of the Committee for the GlobalChild project. In this letter the chairman also assigned two members of the Committee: Dr. Anne Skelton (the member of the UN Committee from South Africa), and Mr. Bragi Gudbransson (the member of the UN Committee from Iceland) to remain as the focal persons with the GlobalChild project.
On Nov. 6, 2017, Justice Renate Winter, Chairperson of the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Rights of the Child (2017-2019), issued a letter placing the GlobalChild project under the auspices of the UN.
On Feb. 18, 2014, Prof. Kirsten Sandberg, Chairperson of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (2013-2015), wrote a letter of support as a way of expressing the Committee’s support for developing GlobalChild: a monitoring tool for the Convention on the rights of the Child.
In the summer of 2013, Dr. Ziba Vaghri first proposed the concept of GlobalChild during a meeting in New Brunswick, Canada to the Honourable Jean Zermatten, Chairperson of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (2008-2013), and a few of the current members of the GlobalChild team. The Honourable Jean Zermatten expressed his strong support of the program as a way to harmonize CRC monitoring and report writing in Canada and beyond. This was the point at which the idea of GlobalChild was set in motion.
On July 20, 2008, Dr Yanghee Lee, Chairperson of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (2007-2011), issued a letter to the General Comment No. 7 (GC-7) indicator group commenting favourably on the “remarkable progress made with regard to the elaboration of indictors” and stating that “the next steps have to be pilot studies in order to test and revise the list of indicators if necessary” with UNICEF’s support.
On Dec. 4, 2006, the Honourable Jakob Egbert Doek, Chairperson of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (2001-2007), issued an initial letter, addressed to Dr. Clyde Hertzman, to build an ad hoc team and start working on operationalizing the General Comment no. 7 (GC-7): Implementing child rights in early childhood, adopted in October 2005. The letter was “to construct a positive agenda for rights in early childhood” (para. 5), which encompasses all aspects of a young child’s well-being and development and with urging encouragement “to develop data collection and indicator systems” consistent with the Convention.
