A workshop on the Convention on the Right of the Child held in Nuku'alofa last week aimed to help Tonga finalise its first country report on the rights of the child, 10 years after Tonga ratified the convention.

Visiting Tonga last week were Daniel Dravet and Asenaca Vakacegu from the UNICEF Office, Suva, Fiji.

Daniel said that their two-day stay in Nuku'alofa from June 1-2 was to participate in a workshop on the Convention on the Right of the Child (CRC). He said that primarily their presence at the workshop was to facilitate the writing of Tonga's Initial Country Report. The report was supposed to have been submitted to the committee of the CRC in Geneva in 1997, two years after Tonga ratified the CRC in 1995, but due to a "lack of resources and difficulties of getting data, and that delayed the report," said Daniel.

September will be the 15th anniversary of when the Convention on the Right of the Child came into force, and Daniel said that the committee on CRC was pressuring for all pending reports to be submitted before then.

Daniel said that the Nuku'alofa workshop was to accelerate the finalisation of Tonga's Initial Report. He said that a draft had already been prepared by the National Coordination Committee for Children.

Asenaca said that when Tonga ratified the CRC in 1995 it made a commitment to submit an Initial Country Report in 1997, and then a Periodic Report after every five years.

The convention is an Internationally agreed upon standard on how to treat children. "It is not a legal instrument, it is a set of standards. The law of the state party may be different from the convention. It up to the country to see what they can do to harmonise their law and the convention."

He said that the reporting to the committee of CRC was very important "to keep countries up to date with the requirement of the International convention of how a country should treat its children."

Daniel said that the convention had been ratified by all countries in the world except one, and it had "become very powerful because it is an expression of the will of the world community on how children should be treated."

He said that UNICEF had been involved with Tonga ratifying the Convention in 1995, and the financing of the workshop.