New UN Special Representative Appointed to Combat Violence against Children

On April 30, Ban Ki-moon announced the appointment of the first Special Representative of the Secretary-General on violence against children, a step that Human Rights Watch had been promoting for nearly nine years. A Special Representative is a prominent expert appointed by the Secretary-General to represent him with governments and investigate human rights violations. Human Rights Watch has documented severe violence against children, whether in homes where they work as domestic servants and face beatings or sexual abuse by their employers, in classrooms where they face corporal punishment from teachers or administrators, or on metropolitan streets where they face abuses at the hands of the police.  We first persuaded the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child to recommend an in-depth multi-million dollar UN study on violence against children, then successfully lobbied the UN General Assembly to initiate it in 2002. We arranged a large advisory council of local and international NGOs, which provided input for the UN study. After the study was completed in 2006, at least 47 governments identified violence against children as a priority for national planning in 2007; Greece, the Netherlands, and New Zealand adopted laws prohibiting all forms of violence against children; at least seven countries in eastern and southern Africa passed or drafted new legislation with a specific focus on sexual violence; and at least five countries reformed their juvenile justice laws.  To ensure that violence against children would remain prominently on the agenda of the United Nations and its member states, we pressed UN member states to request the appointment of a special representative, and the General Assembly made the formal request to the Secretary-General in 2007. Ban’s choice, Marta Santos Pais, is well-known to Human Rights Watch. A member of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, she also served as an advisor to Human Rights Watch on its work on children’s rights. Human Rights Watch and the NGO advisory council plan to work closely with Santos Pais to promote effective solutions for violence against children worldwide.
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