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Subgroup on Children without Parental Care

The Working Group's main aim is to promote and contribute to drawing up international standards for the protection of children without parental care, and to secure their adoption by the UN General Assembly.

Convenor: International Social Service (Nigel Cantwell, ISS Consultant)

Overall Objective for 2004-2005

The NGO Working Group was set up in November 2004 following the Decision of the Committee on the Rights of the Child in September 2004 recommending that the Commission on Human Rights itself set up a working group to develop international standards for the protection of children without parental care.

In this context, for its initial months of operation (November 2004-April 2005), the Working Group's specific initial objective was to ensure that the Commission on Human Rights take on board this recommendation.

Side Event on the "Need for International Guidelines for the Protection of Children without Prental Care"

On 15 September 2005, just before the Day of General Discussion which was devoted this year to children without parental care, the working group organised an NGO event. Around 60 people attended the NGO panel presentation, followed by a lively discussion and a market place in which NGOs could share their work. You can have a look at the presentations given during that event:

• Launch of the first paper of the 'First Resort' series
  David Tolfree, Save the Children UK
  
• Child participation in setting standards for out-of-home care
  Monika Niederle, FICE on behalf of the Quality4Children project
  
• Preventing separation
  Zeina Allouche, SOS Children's Villages Lebanon
  
• Piloting practice standards for the out-of-home care of children
  Diane Swales, Save the Children UK
  
  

Current Activity

Prepare an annotated outline of the international guidelines on the protection of children without parental care: an initial version of this text was discussed at the first consultation; a final version was cleared by the Working Group on 20 January. It was initially addressed to the CRC Committee to provide a detailed idea of the potential scope
of the Guidelines and explaining the main issues that they might cover. The Committee's Chair gave his informal approval and suggested the Working Group use this text as the basis for its advocacy.

The working group is currently developing further this outline in order to submit a more elaborated draft to the Committee on the Rights of the Child in January 2006.