Leveraging United Nations Human Rights Mechanisms to End Child Marriage: A Step-by-Step Toolkit for Civil Society Organisations

"International human rights treaties are a powerful set of tools for advocates seeking transformative change."

This toolkit was developed to facilitate civil society organisation (CSO)s' engagement with international human rights mechanisms in order to strengthen national advocacy strategies to end child marriage. It covers four key United Nations (UN) human rights mechanisms and includes explanations on each of them, how they link with child marriage, as well as extra resources, tips, and timelines to support advocacy.

As explained in the toolkit, "the Committees overseeing the legal frameworks offer many opportunities for civil society organisations to participate in reviewing how states fulfil their human rights obligations, and in pressing for better implementation of human rights law. Incorporating engagement with these human rights monitoring mechanisms into their advocacy strategies can be an effective way for civil society organisations to advance the agenda to end child marriage and support girls and adolescents who are - or have been - married or in a union (ever-married girls)."

The toolkit is structured into four main sections, one for each of the key human rights monitoring mechanisms:  

1. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC Convention) - The CRC Convention does not explicitly mention child marriage, but it does emphasise ending harmful practices that affect children's wellbeing and rights like education, health, and protection from violence.

2. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Convention) - The CEDAW Convention requires states to remove gender bias in marriage and family matters, ensuring equality in the right to marry and freely choose a spouse. This Convention also prohibits child betrothal and marriage, requiring the adoption of laws to set a minimum age of marriage and enforce marriage registration.

3. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR Covenant) - The CESCR Covenant highlights the negative impacts of early marriage on rights like health, education, and employment. It calls for measures to protect children from social and economic exploitation.

4. The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) - The UPR is a unique mechanism of the Human Rights Council that calls for each UN Member State to undergo a regular peer review of its human rights records. The UPR provides each state the opportunity to regularly report on the actions they have taken to improve the human rights situation in their countries and to receive recommendations from UN Member States for continuous improvement. Hundreds of recommendations concerning child marriage have been issued through the UPR, highlighting the growing recognition of the urgent need to address this practice to safeguard girls' and women's rights.

The toolkit includes all the relevant information to engage with these mechanisms at all stages of the reporting cycle. The sections related to the CRC, CEDAW, and CESCR Committees are organised as follows:

• Introduction to each mechanism
• Articles of the Convention/Covenant, Optional Protocols and General Comments/Recommendations relevant to child marriage advocacy
• A practical, step-by-step guide on how the Committee's reporting process works and how CSOs can engage with it
• Examples of promising practice and learning shared from Girls Not Brides member organisations
• A guide to writing a CSO report for these mechanisms

The section related to the UPR is organised as follows:

• Introduction to the UPR
• Understanding the links between child marriage and the UPR
• The UPR cycle explained
• Step-by-step guide on how CSOs can engage with the UPR
• Guiding examples for UPR CSO submissions
• A guide to writing a CSO report for the UPR

To help prioritise advocacy actions based on organisational capacity, the toolkit offers a traffic light system indicating highly recommended and recommended actions related to each mechanism.