This webinar was conducted in English but the video recording is available with French and Spanish captions. View the Spanish and French subtitles by clicking on the 'Settings' icon at the bottom right of the video player.
While ensuring suitable care for children deprived of their families is of utmost importance (article 20 CRC), growing evidence shows that the preservation and access to the child’s identity in this process – including name, nationality and family relations (article 8 CRC) – is of equal importance. Even when children have grown up in a loving and secure family environment, missing elements of their identity can have a lifelong impact of a legal, medical and/or psychosocial nature.
This webinar, the fourth in a series from the Transforming Children's Care Global Collaborative Platform, explored the importance of protecting the child’s right to identity in how it is created, how it may be modified and/or falsified in alternative care as well as the need to preserve information about the child’s identity, notably family relations. The webinar addressed the significant issue of State’s responsibility to speedily re-establish the child’s complete identity.
Moderator:
Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, President, Child Identity Protection
Speakers:
Cornelius Williams, Associate Director & Global Chief of Child Protection, Programme Division UNICEF
David Smolin, Harwell G. Davis Professor of Constitutional Law, and Director, Center for Children, Law, and Ethics, at Cumberland Law School, Samford University
Maeve O'Rourke, Barrister and Lecturer in Human Rights at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, School of Law, National University of Ireland Galway
Lynelle Long, Vietnamese adoptee born in the early 70s, Founder of InterCountry Adoptee Voices (ICAV)
Ann Skelton, Professor of Law at the University of Pretoria and CRC Committee member
