By Deborah McMillan
THIS week marks yet another welcome milestone in the post-Covid return to normality. After nearly two years of attending seminars and conferences with my European counterparts through the somewhat impersonal magic of Microsoft Teams, we are finally managing to get together face-to-face.
I am currently on day two of a three-day spring seminar in Warsaw, hosted by the European Network of Ombudspersons for Children (ENOC). It is especially nice to find myself in Poland for a meeting of this kind, since Jersey has such strong links with the country. But, to be honest, the real value of these events transcends the location: it’s about the connections that you are able to make and the more informal conversations you can have in the margins of the main meetings.
Zoom, Teams, FaceTime and every other platform that has helped keep us in touch during the pandemic are all well and good, but there is no substitute for talking in person. And as an Island community we, more than most, need to ensure that we maintain good, healthy relations with our colleagues across the continent.
There is enormous value, not only in sharing on a wider stage the great work that the Island has done (more of that in a moment), but also in being able to discuss in quieter times the common challenges that each of our countries face. And, perhaps most importantly of all, in pooling our wisdom and finding ways to work together as we look to overcome these challenges.
So what exactly is ENOC and why is it so important for Jersey to be an active member of this community?
ENOC is a not-for-profit association of independent children’s rights institutions, and its mandate is to protect and promote children’s rights in countries throughout Europe.
In practice, this means that the children’s commissioners of member states have the opportunity to discuss and develop strategies, while working groups of young people from those countries are also able to meet and collaborate on a wide range of topics.
At the spring seminar this week, the main focus of our discussions – and of the work fed in from young people from many places including Jersey – is ‘Children’s Rights and Climate Justice’. A paper that brings together all the views and contributions from ENOC’s member states will be published tomorrow.
Once published, it will be available on our website, but I can perhaps allow myself a couple of sneaky spoilers by mentioning some of the excellent work from Jersey on the child rights impact assessment of our Island’s Carbon Neutral Roadmap proposal.
This will be referenced in ENOC’s final paper – in particular, the work of members of Jersey’s Youth Parliament, who surveyed young people from across the Island about their thoughts on the environment, while also attending the Citizens’ Assembly to provide recommendations from their findings.
In addition, the States’ eco active team will be noted for the part they have played in raising awareness of sustainable environmental practices in schools.
Similarly, the fact that Jersey has now adopted the new Children (Convention Rights) Law is to be noted as another significant step in our journey towards becoming an internationally recognised rights-respecting community. And this is no mean feat, considering where that journey began.
It was following the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry that my office was established as the Island’s first national human rights institution (NHRI), and Jersey was able to apply to join networks of NHRIs, such as ENOC and its UK affiliate, the British and Irish Network of Ombudsmen and Children’s Commissioners.
That was three years ago, and since then our presence at seminars and conferences, as well as our participation in joint programmes and initiatives, have fast become permanent fixtures. And the value of this kind of international participation is something that the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child is constantly reiterating.
In their words, ‘It is the view of the committee that every state needs an independent human rights institution with responsibility for promoting and protecting children’s rights… It is essential that promotion and protection of children’s rights is “mainstreamed” and that all human rights institutions existing in a country work closely together to this end.’
I would simply say: it’s good to talk. Because when we stop to talking to other jurisdictions and when we stop sharing (both our successes and our ongoing challenges), we begin to run the risk of becoming isolated. And that is where the problems are apt to creep in.
The ‘Jersey way’ that became the Care Inquiry’s byword for so much that had gone wrong in our past is, by its very nature, an insular thing. And so the act of establishing an NHRI in the Island was the first major step towards a cure for that problem – because it connects us. It networks us into a tried and tested ‘international way’, in which children’s rights are, as the committee says, ‘mainstreamed’.
It was highly demoralising for a community like ours, which is a fundamentally decent and caring one, to have found itself at the centre of the sort of dreadful publicity that preceded the Care Inquiry.
But it ought to be an ongoing comfort to know that the collective efforts of our many agencies here in the Island are slowly and steadily being introduced to wider audiences and placed on the agendas of meaningful international discussions.
