Hopman, Marieke, Guleid Ahmed Jama and Yael Warshel. Born in a non-existent place? Towards inclusive global rights protection for children living in de facto states. Children’s Rights Research Group Maastricht University Report to the United Nations Children’s Rights Committee, (27 pp.), 2024

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Supposedly, human rights are universal, and children all over the world have rights, irrespective of their language, nationality or ethnicity. Yet one category of children remain systematically excluded from international legal protection: children living in de facto states. This report informs the international community about the exclusion of these children, and offers suggestions for how they might be included.

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To this purpose, together with a large team of expert contributors, Maastricht University's Children’s Rights Research (CRR) team have produced this report. It was  presented to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, and discussed with other relevant actors, in May 2024. Its recommendations have since been cited as a blueprint for the UN to work towards implementing.

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You can find the full report here.

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The report has been summarised into several languages, available for download below.

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In addition, a group of Maastricht University students mapped out how different UN human rights bodies interact with de facto states and summarized said analysis in an excel file available here. (Not 100% complete yet, this preliminary represents an important dataset for analyses of international human rights law and de facto states, and thus has been made available, courtesy of Maastricht University's CRR Team).