Draft:The Jebb Committee

• Comment: We'd need some secondary, independent sources (newspapers? books? magazines? journals) that report on this. Qcne (talk) 21:20, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

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The Jebb Committee is a group that highlighted the conditions of children and youth in Norway.

Every five years, all countries that have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child must report on how they are fulfilling these rights.

Norway submitted its report in 2016. After the states themselves have submitted their reports, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child seeks as much additional information as possible. Therefore, civil society, through non-governmental organizations and bodies, can submit their own reports. Supplementary reports are submitted by civil society after the state has submitted its report.

Reporting

In June 2016, under the auspices of Press and LNU, The Norwegian Children and Youth Council, the opportunity was announced for the first time to contribute to writing a shadow report on behalf of children and youth in Norway. The youth selected for this committee represented various children and youth organizations, and a total of seven young people were chosen to participate in this process. The committee’s name comes from Save the Children’s founder, Eglantyne Jebb, who also initiated some of the work that led to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The actual work on the report took place from August 2016 to July 2017, when the report was submitted to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Finishing and results

On September 26, 2017, the report was launched and made public at an event in Oslo, along with two other supplementary reports from the Omnbudsperson for Children and the Forum for the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The reports were presented to, among others, members of parliament from the Conservative Party, the Christian Democratic Party, and the Labour Party.

In October of the same year, the three reports were presented to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child ahead of the Norwegian state’s hearings with the committee in Geneva.

The Jebb Committee outside Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Genève

The committee persisted of

Navn	Organisasjon
Erle Harsvik	Uro
Hayden Galdames Myrbostad	Press
Ismail Rauand	Grønn Ungdom
Iver Daaland Åse	Humanistisk Ungdom
Magnus Thun	Elevorganisasjonen
Marianne Knudsen	NHFU
Solrun Nyborg	Press

The work was coordinated by Press and LNU.

Contents of the report

The report written by the committee was named “Kidza har rett” (“Kids Have Rights”) and is divided into three parts focusing on violations of children’s rights, children’s knowledge of their own rights, and children’s and youth’s participation and involvement. The report also includes an appendix with advice from children and youth to the Prime Minister.

Part 1: Violations of Children’s Rights

This section is sorted by six different rights areas and concludes with highlighting three violations of children’s rights that the committee is particularly concerned about. Each chapter lists the article of the Convention on the Rights of the Child that is being violated and provides solutions for the various violations.

The concluding comments highlight these three violations as particularly negative

• The situation of asylum-seeking children in Norway
• The number of children who say they have experienced severe violence from adults in the family
• Pressure and stress in the daily lives of children and youth, and its impact on their physical and mental health.

(Jebb-Comittee, 2017, p.10-41)

Part 2: Children’s Knowledge of Their Own Rights

This section examines the extent to which children and youth are aware of their own rights and which rights they consider important in their lives. The surveys were conducted at the kindergarten level (ages 5 and 6), 4th grade (ages 9 and 10), 8th grade (ages 13 and 14), and 1st year of upper secondary school (ages 16 and 17). According to the report, the results are largely positive, with over 80% positive responses from the younger grades, with 4th graders topping the list with 86.7% positive responses on whether they know their own rights.

The second part of the survey asked which rights were most important to the children. For the kindergarten children, the question was instead what was important for children to be happy. Much of what the kindergarten children highlighted was having someone to play with and that everyone should be included, as well as care and safety. They were also asked what was needed for them to be happy themselves, with 29% of the children answering family, care, and safety.

For the older children (from 4th grade to 1st year of upper secondary school), questions were asked about their three most important rights. There were similarities across all grades, with answers largely focusing on school, food and drink, safety, being heard and having a say, as well as freedom of expression and equality. The concluding comments describe that meeting basic needs, having friends, going to school, safety, and care are seen as most important. It also points out a connection between the violations in Part 1 regarding care and safety and mentions that fulfilling these rights should therefore be a priority for the authorities.

(Jebb-Comittee, 2017, p.42-53)

Part 3: Participation and Influence

This part uses input from the National Council for Children’s and Youth Organizations, the Student Organization, the Central Youth Council in Oslo, and Press to highlight how children and youth experience the opportunity for social participation and influence in the democracy around them. Figures from the Student Organization (EO) show that students experience high satisfaction in their school life but low opportunities for influence/participation in their own school life. EO’s elaboration indicates that this is due to varying quality of student participation and student democracy in the different member schools. Particularly, participation can be a result of how the school day is organized, making it difficult for schools to involve students in planning the teaching.

The report highlights that 9 out of 10 municipalities in Norway have youth councils, but that there is also varying quality in the work done in these councils. It encourages better national guidelines for how such youth councils should function and that youth councils should be mandatory.

Finally, the report includes LNU’s input on lowering the voting age to 16, which the committee supports.

(Jebb-Comittee, 2017, p.55-57)

External links

• Kidza har rett (Norwegian version)
• Kidz have rights (English version)

Litterature

Jebb-Comittee. (2017). Kidza har rett. From https://press.no/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Kidza-har-rett-nett.pdf