Legal address: Via Vetulonia 90
Office: Via Gallia 202
Rome
Italy
- Human rights
- Youth and education
Our Mission: DCI is dedicated to ensuring on-going, practical, systematic and concerted international action directed towards promoting and protecting the rights of the child, as articulated in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, its optional protocols and all other human rights instruments.
Our Vision: Children should enjoy and exercise their rights in a just and responsible society.
Institutional Objectives
ADVOCACY
·To advocate for children's rights so as to achieve the acknowledgement of children as equal subjects before the law, within the framework of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, its optional protocols, and all other human rights instruments;
·To develop national and international strategies for interpellation and public denunciation of the infringements on the individual and collective rights of children.
AWARENESS-RAISING
·To foster awareness about, and solidarity towards the rights of children, children's rights initiatives, situations and issues throughout the world;
·To create forms of massive social and educational communication which promote debate and raise awareness among the public regarding the realities of childhood and adolescence, helping to generate public opinion.
PROMOTION
·To seek, promote and implement the most effective means of securing the protection of children’s rights in concrete situations, from both a preventive and curative standpoint.
ACTION
·To implement projects and actions destined to protect the rights of children directly and effectively, specifically in those problematic areas not safeguarded by other organizations.
·To carry out follow-up activities to inspect the design and implementation of policies, laws and other provisions related to childhood.
·To guarantee that in the event that a child’s rights are threatened, restricted or violated, the affected child will have easy and immediate access to optimal mechanisms of protection, defence and safekeeping.
PARTICIPATION
·To promote spaces in which children have the opportunity to act as protagonists in societies and communities, to participate in decision making processes which involve them, as well as to create decent lives for themselves.
DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVE
·To approach the rights of children and adolescents from a development perspective, which implies different levels of action: political, social, community and family-based and in collaboration with all stakeholders in the development of the child.
·To provide an institutional point of reference for local, national and international efforts oriented toward promoting, protecting, defending and developing the rights of all children, by influencing national and international legislation.
The Italian section has joined the international campaign “No kids behind bars” promoted at global level by the international network and coordinated by DCI Nederland and is, in this framework, carrying on research, information and networking activities in the Italian territory. It has also cooperated with the Dutch section regarding translations of legal papers for judicial proceedings in cases of serious violations of children’s rights.
In Italy Defence for Children International has participated in 2008 at the establishment and is a member of the Board of the National Institute for the Rights of the Child (INDIMI) founded by Prof. Luigi Citarella, the Italian Member of the Committee on the Rights of the Child. Along with Indimi, UNICEF, Arciragazzi, Save the Children it is promoting in Italy the campaign to abolish corporal punishment on children launched by the Council of Europe.
It is collaborating with UNICEF on the working table on the Italian legislation on migration in order to analyse and advocate for the protection of children rights.
As far as training on children rights in 2008 we participated as speakers at seminars and conferences (in particular University of Rome Tre, University of Bologna, University Pontificia Salesiana).