Implementing the consideration of Human Rights and Child Rights and Safeguarding when Planning an Event

Background

What are Human Rights and Child Rights?

Human rights are the basic rights and freedoms that belong to everyone without exception from birth and are the ground-rules for treating people with dignity, respect, equality, and fairness. Human rights are a set of ideals rooted in all cultures and religions and codified in the UN declarations and treaties that emerged after World War II, most of which are embedded in national laws.

Human rights range from rights and freedoms like the right to life, freedom of expression, the right to education, the right to health, and the right to an adequate standard of living, and freedom from discrimination. Many human rights will already be familiar to event organisers, such as freedom from discrimination, the right to decent working conditions, freedom from slavery and torture, the right to privacy, and the right to rest and leisure. Human rights cover several subsets, including child rights (protected by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child), workers’ rights (covered by Conventions of the International Labour Organization) and rights of other groups (see bibliography).

Child rights belong to every person under 18. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises that every child has rights, whatever their ethnicity, gender, religion, language, abilities, or any other status. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child lays out the specific rights that apply only to children, as well as what governments must do to make sure all children can enjoy their rights. Children have the right to be treated with dignity and fairness, to be protected, to develop to their full potential and to participate. Four general principles underpin child rights: non-discrimination, the best interests of the child, the right to survival and development, and the right to be heard.

What is Safeguarding?

‘Safeguarding’ refers to the policies, procedures and actions that event organisers should take to ensure that anyone working on their behalf, and anyone benefitting from the work they are doing, does not come to any harm, either intended or unintended as a result of the work taking place. Safeguarding is the prevention of or response to harm and abuse of children, young people, and adults at risk. This includes physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, neglect and maltreatment of children and adults at risk by employees, volunteers, and other persons, including contractors, business partners, and visitors. Safeguarding is an essential process that falls under the umbrella of respecting human and child rights. It specifically addresses poor practice, and aims to prevent an escalation that could lead to harm in future.

Guidance for Implementing the Consideration of Human and Child Rights and Safeguarding When Planning an Event

In 2019 Positive Impact Events began a collaboration with The UK Committee for UNICEF (Unicef UK) to produce resources to support an event to be planned with the consideration of Human Rights and Child Rights and Safeguarding. Through this, a guidance for implementing the consideration of human and child rights and safeguarding when planning an event was created. This guidance is a consultation draft that could be used as part of an event organisers implementation of ISO 20121 once completed.

Download Guidance

Would you like to give feedback on the Guidance?

We are gathering feedback on the guidance for the consideration of Human and Child Rights and Safeguarding when planning an event, as attached above. This is your opportunity to provide input, following reviewing the guidance, you can answers the questionnaire explaining your experience of the guidance. Your feedback will be shared with Unicef UK who will action the comments to create the final guidance

The deadline for feedback is 6pm on 24th of February 2022

For respondents not familiar with human and child rights and safeguarding; Positive Impact and Unicef UK have created educational materials on key human and child rights concepts that will support your understanding of the guidance and will help you provide feedback, see the resources below:

Understanding safeguarding when planning an event

Understanding meaningful participation when planning an event

Understanding remedy when planning an event

Note: To gather as much feedback as possible we have included a full set of questions that we are investigating. We do not expect every respondent to have evidence on every question. Respondents can skip through to the questions of most relevance to their evidence.

Name

First Name

Last Name

Organisation

1. Page 6, Terms and Definitions: Are there any additional terms and definitions we should include here?

2. Page 11, Table 2: Are there any additions we should make to Table 2 ‘List of Affected groups and those At Risk of Safeguarding-related Harm’?

3. Page 22, Acting on the findings: Recognising that events have the potential to contribute positively to human rights, how can we best capture the fact that event organisers will likely want to map their positive contribution?

4. Page 22, Acting on the findings: How do we best approach the issue of identifying positive human rights contributions in: the actions to address risks and opportunities, the issue identification and evaluation?

5. Page 22, Acting on the findings: For example, how does the OC target populations which are expected to benefit? E.g. livelihood assessments before, during and after the event.

6. Is the content within Annex D clearly communicated? Do you think the language and structure are accessible to readers?

7. Is the language around human and child rights and safeguarding easy to understand?

8. Is there anything from your own experience of embedding human and child rights and safeguarding in event planning that you think has been omitted from Annex D? Have you any recommendations for how we should capture this?

7. Are there any other comments you wish to make?