The Reports to the UN

The Convention provides for a monitoring mechanism on the States to make sure that they implement the provisions laid down in the treaty at the national level. To this end , the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child was set up and headquartered in Geneva. The Committee is composed of 18 people with a specific experience and expertise, who are elected by the signatory States with the task of examining the progress made by the individual States in the implementation of the Convention. In order to allow this monitoring, each State submits to the Committee a periodic report on the adopted measures within 2 years from the ratification of the Convention and then every 5 years –.

The preparation of the Report is a long study and analysis process  carried out by numerous institutional and non-institutional parties, and concerns applicable legislation, statistical data, successful projects, as well as the different bilateral and multilateral international cooperation initiatives taken by Italy.

In Italy, Presidential Decree No. 103 of 14 May 2007 provides that the Government submits the Report on the basis of the template/draft previously prepared by the National Observatory for Childhood and Adolescence. The draft report in its final version is then sent to the Interministerial Committee for Human Rights (Comitato interministeriale per i diritti umani .- CIDU) under the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, which forwards it to the UN Committee for examination.

The evaluation procedure provides that the Committee sets the dates of the Plenary session and the Pre-session. During the Pre-session the Committee meets, behind closed doors, the NGO delegations and the coalitions having previously sent written information, in the form of alternative or supplementary reports, from which recommendations on critical topics can emerge.

Before the Plenary session, the UN Committee sends the Government the so-called ‘List of issues’, through which it asks the State to specify and provide more information and details on some issues. The State shall answer in writing and within the set deadlines to all the requests and, in the Plenary session, the state of implementation of the Convention in the State Party is discussed on the basis of the Government’s Report, as well as any supplementary Reports made by the NGOs, and the official reply to the List of Issues. In its Concluding Observations, the UN Committee underlines the progress made by the State in the implementation of the Convention, as well as persisting challenges , inviting the State to take  action if  the situation is not consistent with the provisions of the Convention.

In 2017, Italy submitted its combined Fifth and Sixth Periodic Reports  on the implementation of the Convention illustrating the policies and programmes concerning children that were implemented by the Italian Government in 2008-2016. In January 2019, Italy attended in Geneva the discussion session on  the main issues identified by the Committee, which then adopted the relevant Concluding Observations.

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