Today, on Human Rights Day, we are pleased to share the Joint Messaging from civil society organisations working on children’s rights in the context of the UN80 Initiative. 

This collective message underscores the urgent need to place children and their rights at the centre of all UN reforms, protect child-specific mandates, strengthen meaningful participation, advance localisation, and ensure sustainable financing for the UN system.  

You can download the document here.  

1. Children and their rights at center of all UN reforms: 

  • We welcome the UN80 Initiative, as a critical opportunity for the UN system to adapt to new realities. This is a moment for the UN system to ensure that it is responsive to rights-holders in fulfilling its mandate across the three pillars of work, as enshrined in the UN Charter.  Given that children amount to around a third of the world’s population, we bear a collective duty to ensure that they are meaningfully included in all aspects of UN reforms.  To date, the rights and concerns of children are absent in reports produced under Workstream 2 and 3. We call upon all Member States to ensure that children in all their diversity are fully and meaningfully included in UN80 assessments and decision-making processes. The future of the UN must be shaped with the rights of children, and future generations, at the forefront of the agenda.  
  • The UN reform must place the promotion, respect, protection, and fulfilment of human rights, and children’s rights in particular, at the heart of all UN pillars, with stronger integration across humanitarian, development, and peace/security efforts. To ensure the UN maintains its commitments and capacity to uphold children’s rights, the Secretary-General’s Guidance Note on Child Rights Mainstreaming (Guidance Note) should serve as a central guiding framework for any reforms undertaken under the UN80 Initiative. The Guidance Note has mandated the mobilization of the UN system to collectively strengthen and elevate a shared UN child rights agenda across all pillars – peace and security, human rights and development -, including through meaningful and effective child participation, adequate budgeting and coordinated implementation across all mandates. 
  • UN80 reforms should include indicators to track the integration of children’s rights and child participation across all pillars. According to the Guidance Note, Child Rights Impact Assessment (CRIA) should be applied to all proposed changes.
  • UN 80 restructuring measures and mandate reform must account for the rights of children as a distinct population with diverse identities, needs and priorities. As reforms are proposed, it is essential to preserve the quality and integrity of mechanisms that are specifically designed either for children or youth so that their unique concerns, including considerations of gender and age, are addressed according to the highest attainable standards, particularly for those in fragile contexts or vulnerable situations.

2. Protect child-specific mandates:  

  • We urge Member States and the Secretariat to ensure that any reforms proposed in the name of efficiency do not weaken the mandates and mechanisms tasked with protecting children and their rights, in particular the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, Special Representatives of the Secretary-General on Violence Against Children and for Children and Armed Conflict, the Special Rapporteur on Special Rapporteur on the sale, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children. Reforms must also not undermine the UN’s operational capacity to support Member States in fulfilling their human rights obligations, in particular the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).  In particular, the recent cancellations of meetings – the May pre-session, as well as the September session and pre-session – of the Committee on the Rights of the Child due to the UN liquidity crisis, have severely undermined the Committees’ ability to fulfil their core mandates and have significantly reduced opportunities for children and diverse civil society, to participate meaningfully in holding States accountable for their obligations under UN human rights treaties. Reforms should preserve, bolster and ensure a sustainable resourcing of these mechanisms to avoid de-prioritization and resource cuts that will close vital spaces for accountability and participation.
  • As part of the considerations to “Review thematic and geographic envoys”1, we call to safeguard the mandates and operational capacities of the Special Representatives of the Secretary-General on Violence Against Children and for Children and Armed Conflict. These entities represent crucial avenues for children to engage with the UN mechanisms that are designed to uphold their rights and their agency. These mandates strengthen international cooperation and inter-governmental partnerships, and support collaboration among Member States and stakeholders across all sectors.  The established working procedures of these mandates also recognize civil society organizations as essential partners in shaping policy and driving action at global, regional, and national levels.
  • As the Action Plan outlines new coordination structures including the Peacebuilding and Peace Support Office and the Human Rights Group these should be designed to preserve specialized child rights and child protection expertise and accountability lines.

3. Strengthening meaningful participation of children and civil society through UN reform:

  • The UN80 must ensure that civil society meaningfully participates in UN 80 decision-making processes with special efforts must be made to include underrepresented groups, particularly children in all their diversity. Participation must be safe, inclusive, and non-tokenistic. All UN reform processes should be open and transparent, with clear agendas, timelines, proposals, and decisions communicated to all stakeholders. 
  • Any restructuring of the UN system must preserve and strengthen the space for civil society engagement. This requires clear, resourced mechanisms for civil society participation in decision-making, monitoring and accountability. Through the reform, civil society space at the UN should be supported, expanded and protected by ensuring hybrid participation modalities, improving physical access for accredited NGOs at all UN premises, ending restrictions on CSO attendance at UNGA High-Level Week sessions, and expanding UN NY access rules especially regarding access to informal negotiations.
  • The UN80 Initiative must institutionalize strong CSO engagement platforms within all Entities, as an essential means for advancing the participation of children in all their diversity and full inclusion of underrepresented groups. Civil society actors, including child and youth-led organizations and movements, must fully, equally, meaningfully, and safely contribute to norm-setting, and oversight.  A reformed UN must therefore treat civil society engagement as a measure of institutional effectiveness, not an optional add-on.
  • UN Reforms should secure predictable and equitable funding channels for CSOs, transparent partnership frameworks, and structured engagement spaces across the three workstreams of UN80 Initiative. In particular, Workstream 3 (“Shifting Paradigms”) offers a chance to institutionalise multi-stakeholder governance, ensuring that the voices of children, including girls, inform decisions on programme realignment and resource allocation.

4. Localize UN operations according to best practice standards for the benefit of children and other diverse local actors

  • Restructuring and decentralizing UN entities and operations under UN80 must be grounded in best-practice standards for localization, ensuring that all measures are responsive to rights-holders, sustainable, and cost-effective. Localization best practice requires meaningful partnerships with local and national civil society in the design, governance, and implementation of policies and programmes, along with fair access to resources, shared decision-making, and proportionate accountability. Efforts to increase operational efficiency should be guided by flexibility, trust and mutual accountability. New business systems should center diverse local actors, including women-, youth-, child-, girl-, disability- and community-led organisations, and recognize their expertise, authority and experiences. These actors must be able to access and manage direct, flexible, predictable, multi-year funding, supported by clear and streamlined grant requirements adapted to their specific contexts and capacities. Best practice also requires shared responsibility for administrative burdens and risks among UN Entities and partners, supported by gender- and age-specific and disaggregated metrics that support accountability and transparency in the equitable distribution of resources.

5. Prioritize long-term financial and environmental sustainability 

  • Reforms should build upon the past successes of existing mandates and maximise opportunities for collaboration and resource pooling among mechanisms for children and youth, such as the online child rights training programme developed by UNICEF. Making these resources available to all United Nations entities, expand knowledge and expertise on children’s rights among all UN Entities, thereby leveraging existing expertise and human resources without increasing costs.
  • The UN80 Initiative must prioritize financial and environmental sustainability over cosmetic or short-term solutions. At a time when the UN is facing one of the gravest financial crises since its creation, driven by some Member States failing to pay their assessed contributions in full and on time, reforms must not be quick fixes that fail to address root causes and undermine the UN’s purpose. Short-sighted measures risk causing long-term harm to the rights and well-being of current and future generations.
  • Despite its broad mandate, the human rights pillar remains chronically underfunded. Further reduction in funding for human rights would yield minimum savings and jeopardize the rights of children and have long-term negative consequences for their well-being. All three pillars, development, peace and security, and human rights, must be adequately resourced.
  • Member States are accountable and must pay their UN dues in full and on time to ensure sustainable funding for child rights programs.

List of signatories:

  1. Child Rights Connect  
  2. Child Fund Alliance
  3. Environment Africa Zambia 
  4. Edmund Rice International 
  5. Fondation Apprentis d’Auteuil International  
  6. Instituto Alana 
  7. Plan International 
  8. Plataforma de Infancia 
  9. SOS Children’s Villages International 
  10. Save the Children  
  11. World Vision