The Center for the Rights of the Child from Uzice has conducted an independent assessment of the analysis of the realization of the rights of the child in the process of Serbia's accession to the European Union - the second alternative report on the implementation of activities of the Action Plan for Chapter 23 in the part relating to the rights of the child.
The subject of the report is to produce an independent assessment of the implementation of the Action Plan for Chapter 23 (AP 23), in parts relating to the rights of the child, ending at the end of the third quarter of 2017. After publishing the first report in mid 2017, whose findings and conclusions were delivered to the European Union in the process of collecting written contributions from civil society to the European Commission reports on the progress of Serbia in the negotiations on EU membership, but also presented to the public, interested groups and civil society organizations association, the Child Rights Center in Uzice continued monitoring the implementation of AP 23 and this report is the result of these efforts.
We are pleased to note that in their latest available report, their second independent report, the state authorities corrected certain estimates and based on its content, they recognized our report as a useful corrective mechanism. In this second report, which aims to fill this gap, the same points are addressed as in the first, that is, the points directly related to the rights of the child - juvenile justice, civil and administrative procedures in which children participate, inclusion of children and deinstitutionalisation, family support for the realization of the right of the child to live in the family environment, protection of basic rights in the education of particularly vulnerable groups, protection against violence, abuse and neglect, and at the very beginning, the fundamental issue of organization and planning of jobs of which the rights of the child depend on, the focus was on new information and analysis of new documents, that is, actions, at the points where they were.
Once again, we draw special attention to the issue of educating children about their rights, which is highlighted in the Report on the screening of Serbia - the negotiating chapter 23 of the judiciary and fundamental rights, in the part relating to the analysis of the state of exercising the rights of the child in Serbia. The report states that children in Serbia have a "very low level of awareness of their rights..". The Committee on the Rights of the Child recognizes the same problem, so in the Final observations of 2017 it goes a step further, recommending Serbia to establish a systematic solution for learning about the rights of the child at all levels of the education system for all children.
The report was prepared by a group of authors with many years of experience in monitoring the rights of the child, which during the development of the report were involved in the process of lobbying to include issues from the domain of the child's rights to the Action Plan for the negotiation chapter 23, which was proving to be an advantage in the process of drafting this report. The report was created within the project "Monitoring the realization of the rights of the child in the process of Serbia's accession to the European Union", which is realized by the Children's Rights Center in Uzice, supported by Sweden within the framework of the program of the Belgrade Open School "Civil Society for the Advancement of Serbia's Accession to the European Union".