New Chairperson of the CRC Committee

Date: 31st May 2017
Category: Reporting to and monitoring the UNCRC

On Monday 15 May, Renate Winter, the member from Austria, was elected as new Chairperson of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

A new Bureau was also elected and it is now composed of the following members:

Suzanna Aho (Togo), Clarence Nelson (Samoa), Olga Khazova (Russia), Miguel Angel Reyes (Venezuela), and Bernard Gastaud (Monaco) who is the Rapporteur.

The Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is the body of 18 Independent experts that monitors implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child by its State parties. It also monitors implementation of two Optional Protocols to the Convention, on involvement of children in armed conflict and on sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. On 19 December 2011, the UN General Assembly approved a third Optional Protocol on a communications procedure, which will allow individual children to submit complaints regarding specific violations of their rights under the Convention and its first two optional protocols. The Protocol entered into force in April 2014.

From the 15th May to the 2nd June, the Committee on the Rights of the Child held its seventy-fifth session at the Palais Wilson in Geneva, during which time it reviewed the situation of children's rights and the implementation of the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocols in the United States, Bhutan, Lebanon, Qatar, Romania, Mongolia, Antigua and Barbuda, and Cameroon.

The Committee swore in new members including the new Chairperson Renate Winter, elected a new bureau and adopted its agenda and programme of work for the session.

• Find out more about Renate Winter here.