Bulgarian Velina Todorova Reelected Member of UN Committee on the Rights of the Child for 2021-2025
25 November 2020 News
The Bulgarian Velina Todorova was reelected member of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child at the 18th conference of the states-parties to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on November 24, 2020. She received the highest number of votes of all nine new members of the Committee for 2021-2025. Todorova received 149 votes, while the remaining right seats were distributed between the candidates of Japan (145), Belgium (143), Uruguay (128), Ethiopia (127), Georgia (125), Republic of South Africa (123), Butan (120) and Chad (113).
Bulgaria nominated Velina Todorova for a second term. In 2016, she became the first Bulgarian in 30 years to serve as an expert in a Un body. Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Ekaterina Zaharieva and the Bulgarian diplomatic service actively supported Associate Professor Todorova’s candidacy. During her first term, she served as deputy chairman and, in 2020, became rapporteur of the Committee on the Rights of the Child.
Velina Todorova is a highly regarded expert with more than 20 years of experience in the sphere of rights of the child. She served as Director of the International Programs and Cooperation Directorate of the State Agency for Child Protection and Deputy Minister of Justice (2011-2013). As a member of the Committee on the Rights of the Child the priorities in her second term will include children’s rights and alternate care as well as issues related to ecology and the digital environment.
The Committee on the Rights of the Child is composed of 18 independent experts with recognized competence in the area of human rights, who are elected for four-year terms. Their main duty is to monitor the implementation of the convention on the Rights of the Child and its two optional protocols by assisting the states-parties in interpreting its provisions.
2017-2020, the Committee examined the progress in the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 50 states, adopted tree general comments on child rights in conditions of international migration and the justice for children as well as a guide to the application of the Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. Some 25 individual cases were resolved during this period under the Individual Communication Protocol. The Committee came out with statements on concrete violations of the rights of the child around the world and became engaged in the process of improving the work of the committees on the UN conventions on human rights, and issued instructions to the states on the rights of the child in conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic.