General Comment 7: Implementing child rights in early childhood
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child's General Comment 7: Implementing child rights in early childhood is an important document for the Bernard van Leer Foundation. It explains how the Convention on the Rights of the Child should be interpreted when it comes to very young children.
Child rights, as set out by the United Nations through the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1989, provide a framework for thinking about much of our work for disadvantaged young children. UNICEF has produced a useful child-friendly summary to explain child rights in simple language.
But it is not always obvious, from the text of the CRC alone, how child rights should apply to very young children. That's why a General Comment was needed.
General Comments are formal statements in which the UN Committee on the Rights of Child, which is composed of independent experts elected by state signatories to the CRC, advise on how the CRC should be interpreted. While not legally binding, they are widely regarded as authoritative.
The Bernard van Leer Foundation was instrumental in bringing together input from early childhood specialists that informed the deliberations of the Committee. In collaboration with UNICEF and the Committee, we published the book A Guide to General Comment 7, containing extracts from the papers that the Committee considered when drafting GC7.
This book - also available in Spanish - enables readers to explore in further depth the thinking behind how child rights apply to young children. This website also hosts the full texts of the background papers from which those extracts were taken.
Further reading:
- Links to all the General Comments of the Committee on the Rights of the Child
- The full text of General Comment 7: Implementing child rights in early childhood
- A quick two-page summary of GC7 prepared by the Bernard van Leer Foundation.
- Our November 2009 edition of Early Childhood Matters looking at 20 years of the CRC.
- Our book, A Guide to General Comment 7, containing extracts from background papers.
- The full texts of background papers which were extracted for A Guide to General Comment 7.