Almost 2.000 children aged 11-17 years participated in consultation workshops organised in 52 centers / 35 countries across the 5 regions of the world, in the context of “Global Child Rights Dialogue”. The activity took place between September 2018 and March 2019 as part of the international initiative called GlobalChild, that is being led by Dr. Ziba Vaghri and her team at the University of Victoria, Canada. Working under the auspices of the UN Committee on Rights of the Child, the GlobalChild aims are to develop an indicator set for each one of the 41 substantive rights of children under the CRC, to digitize these indicators, and to create a universal child rights monitoring platform called GlobalChild. The GCRD was set up to explore children’s opinions on their rights and enrich the indicators of the GlobalChild with these opinions.
Τwo consultation workshops were organised in Greece, in which 57 adolescents aged 12 to 17 participated. The workshops were held in Athens and Thessaloniki in November and December 2018 under the coordination of InArt12 and in collaboration with a team of experts, 2 public agencies, 6 non-governmental organisations and 12 schools.
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The views of the children involved in the workshops in different regions of the world have been studied and incorporated into the indicators prepared by the Indicators’ Development Team of the programme. After a period of pilot testing (in Canada and Morocco), the GlobalChild will be proposed for use by all (196) member states that have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, when they prepare their regular reports on its implementation. A summary of the children's views and suggestions and their incorporation into the indicators will be soon presented by the Centre for Children’s Rights of the Queen's University in Belfast, which has undertaken the coordination of this action. The findings of the consultation workshops with children in Greece will be announced by InArt12.
During the annual meeting of the GlobalChild Steering Committee in Rabat, Morocco, that took place in July 2019, George Moschos, member of the Committee and co-founder of InArt12, presented Global Child Rights Dialogue and the methods used in Greece (see his presentation here).