About GC7 - what it is, why it matters

General Comment number 7 (GC7) of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child explains how the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) should be interpreted when it comes to young children. This is a key document for the Bernard van Leer Foundation.

Child rights, as set out in the CRC, provide an important framework for thinking and advocating about much of the foundation's work. But it is not always obvious, from the convention alone, how child rights should apply to very young children. That's where GC7 comes in.

General Comments are formal statements in which the Committee on the Rights of Child explains how the CRC should be understood. The Committee is composed of independent experts elected by countries that have ratified the Convention. Though General Comments are not themselves legally binding, they are widely regarded as authoritative and useful contributions to understanding.

The full text of the CRC is here, with a translation into "child-friendly" language by UNICEF available here (pdf). The full text of CG7 is here (pdf). A quick two-page summary of GC7 prepared by the Bernard van Leer Foundation is here (pdf).

The foundation was instrumental in bringing together input from early childhood specialists that informed the deliberations of the Committee that went into the drafting of GC7. In collaboration with UNICEF and the Committee, the foundation has published the book A Guide to General Comment 7. Free to order or download as a pdf, the book contains extracts from the papers that the Committee considered when drafting GC7.

This book - also available in Spanish (order/download) - is intended to enable readers to explore in further depth the thinking behind how child rights apply to young children and how they can be implemented in practice.

For readers interested in exploring the contributions that lay behind GC7 in still further detail, this website also hosts the full texts from which those extracts were taken.