Accountability for the Post-2015 Targets on Violence Against Children

This paper considers the case of the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) targets on violence against children and the potential to use existing monitoring and reporting mechanisms to:

• track progress on the SDG targets on violence against children
• involve a range of stakeholders in doing so
• provide accountability for the promises made to children in this area

A detailed examination is made of the way in which the individual SDG targets link to legally binding commitments already made under various human rights treaties. The link to these treaties provides the opportunity to use the range of reporting mechanisms set up under these treaties as complementary mechanisms for both collecting data and other evidence on progress and for then reviewing the effectiveness of – and any gaps in- implementation.

The paper concludes that there do exist current human rights mechanisms to strengthen post-2015 accountability for the SDG targets on violence against children. These are described in detail.