Children’s rights “in our own words”

Legal documents can often be hard to understand for a child. A recent example of this is the General comment no. 25: a document about children that wasn’t written for them. This is why 5Rights and hundreds of children across the globe worked together to give it a makeover.

Through a series of workshops and seminars, children took apart the complicated language of General comment no. 25 and poured its essence into a document that every child across the world will be able to understand.

“We usually know most of our rights in real life but we don’t talk much about our rights in the digital world” – Girl, 17, Morocco

Over the last year, 5Rights has supported the Committee on the Rights of the Child to set out how children’s rights should be seen online. 5Rights has sought the advice of hundreds of experts from across the world and worked in parallel on a child-friendly version of this essential document for children’s rights in the digital environment.

Hundreds of children from across the world participated in this process and shared their thoughts on how an empowering digital world for children looks like. Namely, they stressed the importance for children to have access to a digital world that is safe for them. And their safety shouldn’t be their sole responsibility or their parents’: governments should be responsible for protecting children’s rights online and parents should receive support to better understand the digital world.

Overall, this process has also showed how important it is for legal documents affecting children to be readapted in a language children can easily understand.

“In Our Own Words” is also available in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish.