The Council of Europe programme ‘Building a
Europe for and with children (2006-2008)’ counts amongst its objectives the promotion of meaningful child participation. This was the wish of the
Warsaw conference, which resulted in a three-year-mandate that was given to a task force that coordinates joint actions within the Council’s administration units. Main objective of the programme is to promote children’s rights and the protection of children against violence by helping the member states in building policy. As in all the Council’s programmes the approach is to improve the Council’s legal tools, which are:
- standard settings (conventions, resolutions, recommendations)
- monitoring (all conventions etc. have monitoring systems)
- policy development (via activities happening in the member states)
- cooperation and technical assistance (on request from the members in a bilateral way)
- outreach actions via communication, education, training (thematic campaigns, websites, tutorial manuals, etc.)
The Council of Europe’s conclusion is that, whereas many valuable initiatives can be identified across
Europe , there seems to be a lack of commitment, resources or expertise in governments to develop children participation policies. Together with relevant partners the Council wants to help countries to design and implement participation policies. In order to realise this policy aim, on 15 December 2006 the Council organised a consultative meeting on children participation in its
Strasbourg headquarters. By bringing together a selection of experts on this topic, the objectives of the meeting were to take stock and to asses the impact of existing initiatives (policies, activities, resources), to identify challenges and opportunities for the Council’s action, to advise on working methods and also to discuss children’s involvment in this process. Because of its expertise in this field, ECYC was honoured to be an invitee for this meeting and delegated a Bureau member (
Joris De Bleser ) to be present. Amongst over 30 participants for this meeting there were representatives of a broad range of organisations, institutes, associations, governments, municipalities and research. Besides delegates from the Secretariat General of the Council, different Directorates and other European representatives, also present was Unicef’s project officer on young people’s health and the director of the United Nations Secretary-General’s study on violence against children.
The meeting was informally organised in working groups on different topics related to child participation in municipalities, schools, residential institutions, courts and judicial proceedings, leisure structures and activities. Three questions were discussed:
- How is child participation already implemented and which resources are available?
- What are the major obstacles of implementing child participation and what should be improved?
- What could the Council of Europe do to improve child participation?
At the end of the meeting there were very challenging inputs by Marta Santos Pais (Unicef Innocenti Research Centre), Amaya Gillespie (UN Secretary General’s study on violence against children) and Rasa Seculovic (Save the Children). The final conclusions of the meeting were discussed with the Deputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Ms. Maud De Boer-Boquiccio. Proposals were made for the role of the Council of Europe in further promoting and better child participation.
It’s not clear if a next meeting will follow soon, but there will be a follow up of the meeting results to support the completion of the rest of the three year programme. It would take too much details to unravel the ideas and proposals made during the meeting, but one conclusion was commonly heard amongst all participants, namely that all over the world a strong improvement on child participation can be noticed, even there were it doesn’t seem evident from a European point of view (such as in some South-America countries, South-Africa, Iran, …). European countries can learn a lot from those countries on both legal and judicial level. Also for the United Nations children’s rights and child participation are hot topics. On a global scale child participation is now part of reality and can only steady develop and improve further on.
Website: www.coe.int/children
Joris De Bleser,
Belgium
