American Convention on Human Rights – User-friendly version
American Convention on Human Rights – User-friendly version
The American Convention on Human Rights (also known as the “Pact of San José, Costa Rica”), was signed on 18 July 1978 at the Inter-American Specialized Conference on Human Rights and is one of the treaties of the Inter-American Human Rights System. It embodies the rights and freedoms that must be respected and promoted by the signatory States.
The language used in international human rights instruments is highly complex and difficult to understand for those who are not familiar with it, and even more when they are people under the age of 18.
In this context, the initiative arises to create a “friendly version” of the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights” that makes it possible for children and adolescents to access it.
At the IIN-OAS, we consider it essential to make a user-friendly version of this Convention available, insofar as the inter-American system and the Universal system are part of a single normative body, in which it is necessary to continue adding tools in a friendly format, so that children and adolescents have access to more information and can make use of and operate the relevant devices, both in the universal system (based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child) and in the inter-American system (based on the American Convention).
To elaborate this friendly version the IIN designed a methodology in which children and adolescents are the interlocutors themselves who confront the original text, identify and process its central ideas and rewrite them in terms that are understandable to them. The document has been under development since 2019, as part of the activities planned for the “Programme for the consolidation of systems for the promotion and comprehensive protection of rights”, together with the Organized Thematic Group on Systems (GOT SIPPINNA, for its acronym in Spanish).
Of the 82 articles of the Convention, it was decided to prioritize 33 articles that focus on the human rights of all people, and extracts from them were selected, which were analyzed and discussed by the members of the working group, making contributions to the main draft until reaching the final document.
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