The Eighteenth Birthday of the Convention of Rights of the Child: Achievements and Challenges

Although the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child has produced positive results in many countries, the United States remains one of the few nations that has not signed on to this treaty. This Essay will begin by describing the content of the treaty. This Essay will discuss the achievements, challenges, and solutions resulting from the treaty in the areas of child poverty, violence against children, and child labour. Given the positive results produced in other countries, this Essay will conclude with an invitation to the United States to join the Convention on the Rights of the Child

Communications with the Committee on the Rights of the Child under the Optional Protocol to the CRC on a Communications Procedure and Admissibility: Report on the Decisions of the Committee on Admissibility: Summary and Comments

The first question the Committee on the Rights of the Child has to answer when it receives communications submitted under the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) on a communications procedure (CRC-OP3) is: is the communication admissible? Experiences show that the majority of the cases dealt with by the Committee so far is inadmissible. This means that a lot of time and energy invested in the submission of the communication did not produce the intended result: a decision of the Committee on the complaint that one or more rights in the CRC were violated. This report presents an annotated overview of the decisions of the Committee in which it declared the communication inadmissible. It also provides a number of overarching comments and reflections, in order to inform individuals or (legal) professionals who consider to submit a communication to the Committee, about the different admissibility criteria of CRC-OP3 and the way the Committee applies and interpreters these criteria. The report indicates that many cases are declared inadmissible because they are ill-founded or not sufficiently substantiated. This gives reason for future authors of submissions to make sure that their claim that a right of the CRC was violated is based on the correct legal provisions and that sufficient facts are presented to substantiate the claim. In some cases, adults, usually one of the parents, claim a violation of their rights under the CRC. These claims are inadmissible because they are considered incompatible with the provisions of the CRC, which protect the rights of children and not of adults. Some issues are given separate attention such as the request of States Parties to deal with the admissibility separately from the merits, the intervention of third parties and the working methods of the Committee. The report is based on research until April 2020

Exploring Statelessness and Nationality in Iran

Iran has yet to be the subject of research looking into the gaps in the nationality law, which, could create and perpetuate statelessness. There were however, several pre-identified populations, some members of which are believed to be affected by statelessness, as well as gender discrimination in the nationality law - which causes and increases the risk of rendering children stateless. Therefore, based on this previous knowledge of potentially stateless populations, and the gaps/lack of certain safeguards against statelessness in the nationality law, this research provides a foundation for understanding nationality and statelessness in the country.