South Africa’s Reporting on Children's Rights to the UN

The Alternate Report Coalition – Children’s Rights South Africa (ARC-CRSA), previously referred to as the South African Alternate Report Coalition, is an alliance of organisations invested in realising children’s rights in South Africa.

The alliance was formed in 2013 to draft collective alternate reports to both the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child and to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (the Committee). By August 2016 the alliance has received substantive inputs from 57 authors representing 45 organisations. In addition to the three consultative workshops that were held between 2013 and submission of our alternate report to the Committee in October 2015, ARCCRSA has hosted a further two workshops in 2016 to strengthen our collective positions and consensus on current priorities for realising children’s rights in South Africa.

The last of these was held in July 2016 to consult on the draft text of this, ARC-CRSA’s final submissions to the Committee. 2. These final submissions are ARC-CRSA’s responses to the written replies of the Government of South Africa (GOSA) to the Committee’s List of Issues. We have annexed the text of our oral statement – presented to the Committee in the Pre-Session early in 2016 – to the end of this submission.

The brief oral statement reflects the priority issues identified by ARC-CRSA, through deliberation and consensus building over the three-year period, regarding some of the most important children’s rights issues to be addressed in South Africa. 3. As far as possible, these submissions follow the order of the questions submitted by the Committee to the GOSA in its List of Issues. We have added some contextual information to these where we hold the view that a critical point has not been addressed. We have updated information based on recent developments and we have provided alternative or additional information in cases where we consider the GOSA written replies to have been incorrect or incomplete. Where we refer to paragraphs in brackets in the text, it is to indicate the paragraph of the GOSA reply to which our points relate.