Member of the Committee on Human Rights and Freedoms Mr Momčilo Martinović took part in the meeting where Draft national strategy for exercising children’s rights 2019-2023 was presented.

The meeting suggested that it is necessary to reform the institutional structure of the Child Rights Council, establish model of consultations with children on the issues that the Council deals with, strengthen national unique system of continuous data collection on children’s rights and mechanisms of their sharing, establish clear procedures for informing, consulting and actively participating in decision-making process and preparing new strategic document for exercising children’s rights. Also, the emphasis on the legislative and strategic framework should move towards improving their implementation in practice and provide an equal approach for exercising the rights of vulnerable groups of children. In addition, it is necessary to establish a modern and concise system for monitoring the exercise of children’s rights and ensure cross-sectoral coordination in exercising children’s rights and monitoring the situation, increase public awareness of the children rights, allocate sufficient human, technical and financial resources for exercising children’s rights and monitoring the situation, providing strategies for shifting from international, donor funding sources to local or national funding, and increase the scope of NGO services in the field of children’s rights and quality of those services.

The meeting also concluded that the strategy for exercising children’s rights in Montenegro should be adjusted to children after its adoption, and a special focus should be placed on children with developmental difficulties and children from minority groups, to make it available for them as well, since this is a key document for all children in Montenegro. In addition, the participants have agreed that the Strategy is not the ownership of any institution in Montenegro, but it should be the ownership of children.