States Parties to Child Rights Convention Elect Nine Candidates as Members of Monitoring Committee

The fifteenth Meeting of States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of the Child today elected nine Committee members for a four-year term while appointing Marjon V. Kamara (Liberia) as the Chairperson.

Elected to the Committee on the Rights of the Child by secret ballot, they will replace the members serving until 28 February 2015.

The newly elected members are:  Suzanne Aho Assouma (Togo), Hynd Ayoubi Idrissi (Morocco), Jorge Cardona Llorens (Spain), Bernard Gastaud (Monaco), Hatem Kotrane (Tunisia), Gehad Madi (Egypt), Clarence Joseph Nelson (Samoa), Jose Angel Rodriguez Reyes (Venezuela) and Kirsten Sandberg (Norway).

The Meeting also elected Maria Mjoll Jonsdottir (Iceland) as Vice-Chairperson by acclamation.

At the outset, a Secretariat representative updated delegates on the overall status of child rights protection.  She said that the Convention had recently been ratified by one more, the State of Palestine, describing it as “the most widely accepted international human rights instrument” with 194 States parties now.  The Optional Protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict had been ratified by six additional States and the Optional Protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography by five more, bringing the number of State parties to 156 and 167, respectively.

She also said that the Optional Protocol on a communications procedure, which had entered into force on 14 April, established the competence of the Committee on the Rights of the Child to examine individual and inter-State communications, as well as to initiate inquiry procedures for grave or systematic violations of specific rights under the Conventions and the other two Protocols.  The third protocol had been signed by 45 States and ratified by 11.

Jim McLay (New Zealand), who chaired the fourteenth Meeting, congratulated Ms. Kamara on succeeding him.

Voting Results

The results of the balloting were as follows:

Number of votes obtained: