Meeting of States Parties Elects 9 Members to Child Rights Committee in Secret Balloting, Appoints Chairperson by Acclamation

The sixteenth Meeting of States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of the Child elected nine members to four-year terms on the related United Nations Committee, while appointing Muhammad Anshor (Indonesia) as its Chairperson.

Elected by secret ballot to the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the new members will replace those serving until 28 February 2017.  The new members are:  Amal Salman Aldoseri (Bahrain); Olga A. Khazova (Russian Federation); Cephas Lumina (Zambia); Benyam Dawit Mezmur (Ethiopia); Mikiko Otani (Japan); Luis Ernesto Pedernera Reyna (Uruguay); Ann Marie Skelton (South Africa); Velina Todorova (Bulgaria); and Renate Winter (Austria).

Also elected, by acclamation, was Vice-Chairperson Thorvardur Thorsson (Iceland).

At the outset, David Marshall of the Global Issues Section in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) New York Office, spoke as a representative of the Secretary-General, saying that since the last meeting in June 2014, Somalia and South Sudan had ratified the Convention.  Describing it as “the most widely accepted international human rights instrument”, with 196 States parties, he said only one ratification was needed for it to reach universality.

Nine additional States had ratified the Convention’s Optional Protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict, he continued.  Six others had ratified the Optional Protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, bringing the number of ratifications to 165 and 173, respectively.

He went on to say that 11 additional States parties had ratified the Optional Protocol on a communications procedure, bringing the total number to 27.  Also since 2014, the Committee had examined 83 reports submitted by States parties:  50 initial and periodic reports, submitted under the Convention’s article 44, as well as other reports under the Optional Protocols.  It had reduced its backlog from 88 to 55 reports, having met in parallel chambers during its sixty-eighth, sixty-ninth and seventy-first sessions.

Describing work undertaken in the context of the treaty-body strengthening process, he cited updates to decision No. 11, the adoption of the Committee’s first decision on an individual communication, and the unanimous adoption of the Guidelines against Intimidation or Reprisals, endorsed at the twenty-seventh meeting of chairs of the human rights treaty bodies.  To help States parties understand the Committee’s interpretation of rights protected under the Convention, it had adopted general comment No. 18 (2014) on harmful practices with the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women in its first such joint action with another treaty body, he said.

Voting Results

The results of the balloting were as follows: