Dr. Ziba Vaghri is the director of the GlobalChild program of research and an Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick Saint John. In 2014, she received a five-year Scholar Award from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (MSFHR) in recognition of her decade of pioneering work on linking child development and child rights. She was trained and mentored by one of the most prolific researchers of early child development, the late Professor Clyde Hertzman (OC).
From 2008-2014, as the co-founder and director of the International Program at the Human Early Learning Partnership at the University of British Columbia, she took the lead role in the design, implementation and evaluation of a number of major international projects related to children’s health, development and rights. For the last 13 years, she has partnered with the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC). During this period, as the secretariat and the leader of an international team of experts, Dr. Vaghri led the process of developing the Indicators of General Comment 7 (GC7) – implementation of CRC during early childhood years. Working under the auspices of UN CRC and the GC7 international team, she spearheaded the pilot projects of these indicators in Tanzania, Chile, and the province of British Columbia, Canada. Following the first pilot, Dr. Vaghri developed the concept to digitize the indicators, which led to the creation of the Early Childhood Rights Indicators (ECRI) – an electronic tool to monitor the rights of children ages 0 – 8 years old. She also authored reports to the governments of Chile and Tanzania and their respective United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) offices.
Dr. Vaghri has decades of experience working with government officials and international organizations including World Health Organization, UNICEF, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the UN CRC. Building on this experience, Dr. Vaghri has assembled an impressive team of experts from many Canadian and international universities, as well as a number of prominent Canadian and international child rights promoting institutions. These team members will pool their expertise to partner, collaborate, and develop GlobalChild: a universal and comprehensive child rights monitoring platform.
Dr. Vaghri is the principal investigator and director of GlobalChild, a project and program of research funded by Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). She is now leading the core project of GlobalChild as well as its offshoots: the Global Child Rights Dialogue, and the Child Rights Educational Tools and InspiRight (a project funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
Dr. Yanghee Lee, a professor in the Department of Child Psychology and Education at Sungkyunkwan University, is currently serving as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar. She has been a member of the UN CRC (2003-2013), serving as its chair from 2007-2011, and as chairperson of the Meeting of Chairpersons of Treaty Bodies (2010-2011). Dr. Lee has been the guiding force in the draft, negotiation and adoption of the third Optional Protocol to the CRC on a Communications Procedure.
She is the recipient of many awards, including 2007 Year of the Woman Award (Korea); the 2009 Order of Civil Merit (Suk Ryu Medal), the highest recognition given to a civilian in South Korea, in recognition for her work in protecting and promoting the rights of children worldwide; the 2011 Hyo Ryung Award for her dedication to children and their well-being; and the 2015 Youngsan Diplomat Award for her dedication to human rights. Dr. Lee is an elected member of the Executive Council of the International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect; executive board member of UNICEF National Committee of Korea, and founder and president of the International Center for Child Rights and the Korean Association for Children with Disabilities.
The Honourable Jean Zermatten, former Chair of the UN CRC, was the only Swiss member of the Committee. He is former president and dean of the juvenile court of the Canton of Valais, Switzerland (1980-2005), and chairman of the International Association of Magistrates for Youth and Family (IAYFJM) (1994-1998). He founded, and since 1995, served as the director of the International Institute of Rights of the Child (IDE) in Sion/Switzerland.
Mr. Zermatten has taught juvenile criminal law at the University of Freiburg for ten years. He contributed to numerous draft law projects, including Project for the 1st unified Law for the Criminal Procedure for Minors (Swiss Confederation); inter-cantonal concordat on the implementation of measures for young offenders (accepted in 2003); and collaborated on the creation of the first Swiss children’s rights network, gathering more than 50 Swiss NGOs. He has used his expertise on many continents, including in Africa where he serves as a member of the West Africa Network for Children on the Move. He has been bestowed a Doctor honoris causa (Dr h.c) from both the University of Fribourg (2007) and the University of Geneva (2014).
Dr. Julien is recognized both nationally and internationally for his expertise and commitment in child development, specifically focusing on environment, prevention of neglect and abuse, and impacts related to social and economic inequities on the overall health of children. Dr. Julien has received many honours during his career. He is an Ashoka Fellow and a recipient of the Gold Medal of the Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, the Order of Quebec and the Order of Canada.
Through his foundation, Fondation du Dr Julien, his mission is to enable children from a vulnerable environment to grow and develop their potential in accordance with the UN CRC. A visionary leader, he created a preventive approach, social pediatric community, which ensures compliance of each of the fundamental rights of the child.
Dr. Sue Bennett is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Ottawa and a pediatrician and mental health professional by training. Currently, she is the director of Social Pediatrics and formerly the director of the Child and Youth Protection Program at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario. Her clinical work with maltreated children and youth spans almost three decades. She conducts research and education on social pediatrics, child maltreatment and child rights for multidisciplinary professionals at local, national and international levels.
Sue has been an International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN) councilor since 2008 and was the ISPCAN chair for the joint ISPCAN-International Institute for Child Rights and Development (IICRD) Program of Development for the draft General Comment on Article 19 of the UN CRC which was adopted by the UN CRC Committee in 2011. This General Comment has the potential to significantly transform and advance conceptualizations and practices of child protection throughout the world. Dr. Bennett’s work has evolved from the perspective of the protection of children solely from violence and maltreatment to the overarching perspective of the protection and indeed promotion of all of children’s human rights as exemplified in the UN CRC in order to secure and assure the well-being, health and development of the child to their fullest potential.
Dr. Frank Tompa is a professor in the School in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. His research interests include the design of text management systems suitable for maintaining large reference texts and large, heterogeneous text collections. He has co-authored the book Communicating with XML in addition to more than 70 papers in the areas of database dependency theory, storage structure selection, query processing, materialized view maintenance, text matching, XML processing, information retrieval, structured text conversion, database integration, data retention and security and text classification.
Professor Tompa serves as co-director of the University of Waterloo’s Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and Text Research. During this time, he worked closely with the Oxford University Press to help computerize the OED. Over the last 5 years, he has served on the program committees for 15 international computer science conferences, including VLDB, ICDE, CIKM, and DocEng. Professor Tompa co-founded Open Text Corporation (now headquartered on Frank Tompa Drive).
A Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2010), Dr Tompa received Canada’s Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012); a Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, by Dalhousie University (2013); and a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Canadian Association of Computer Science (2015).
Mr. Adem Arkadas-Thibert is an international child rights consultant and advocate. Currently he works as a key expert on human rights monitoring and advocacy for a direct support programme of the European Union for Civil Society. He was head of the Human Rights Programme at the International Children’s Center (ICC) in Turkey. He has worked with the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United Nations’ Refugee Agency in Turkey, the Association for Solidarity with Asylum Seekers and Migrants, and the Children’s Legal Centre in the UK.
He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Child Rights Network (CRIN) and a member of the International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, and the International Society for Child Indicators. Mr. Arkadas-Thibert has written reports and published articles on child rights, human rights and refugee issues. His main areas of interest are monitoring the implementation of human rights normative frameworks including the UN CRC and human rights impact assessments.
He has over 23 years of experience in programme and project development and management, in developing policy advocacy guides, training materials, as well as running trainings and projects in human rights and children’s rights. Mr. Arkadas-Thibert studied international relations, political science and public administration at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Middle East Technical University (METU). He also completed a masters in theory and practice of human rights at the University of Essex and a Masters in Science (economic and social demography) at Hacettepe University, Turkey.
Dr. Roudsari, a professor in the School of Health Information Science (HIS) at the University of Victoria (UVic), has been involved in research, teaching, management, and external facing activities in the area of health informatics for over 25 years. He completed a PhD at King’s College, University of London (1986), and in 2010, joined UVic as the Director of the School of HIS in the Faculty of Human and Social Development (HSD) (2010-2015). He also served one year as acting associate dean of HSD.
He has taught extensively to both undergraduate and graduate students and has successfully supervised over 100 graduate students, including 19 PhD research students. He has broad interests in health informatics, a passion for quality and excellence in research and teaching in this area, and a desire and demonstrated ability to help others be successful. His interest and expertise span modelling in healthcare, methodology for health resource management, design development, the evaluation of clinical decision support systems, and evaluation methodologies with particular application in telemedicine. More recently, he has focused his interests on big data, ontologies and temporal representation and reasoning. His research has attracted funding from the European Union (EU) and the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. Previously, he successfully led a major innovative EU-funded home telecare project.
Throughout her 30-year career, Dr. Durrant has advocated at all levels for the protection and rights of children. As a professor of community health sciences at the University of Manitoba, she has focused her research and teaching on children’s rights and protection from violence, particularly punitive violence. She co-authored the Joint Statement on Physical Punishment of Children and Youth, Canada’s authoritative call to action on eliminating punitive violence, which has been endorsed by more than 550 professional organizations across Canada.
She was a member of the Research Advisory Committee of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Study on Violence against Children, and co-edited a book published by UNESCO titled Eliminating Corporal Punishment: The Way Forward to Constructive Discipline; this paper became UNESCO’s official position statement on children’s rights to protection from punitive violence. Dr. Durrant’s seminal research on Sweden’s corporal punishment ban (the first in the world) has been cited in parliaments around the world. She has served as a consultant to numerous governments, including Japan, New Zealand and the UK; has provided expert testimony to Canada’s Senate Committee on Human Rights; and has served as an expert witness in the constitutional challenge to section 43 of the Criminal Code of Canada, which provides a defence to the corrective assault of children.
Most recently, Joan collaborated with Save the Children Sweden to develop an innovative parenting program—Positive Discipline in Everyday Parenting—a program that is explicitly based on children’s rights to protection and participation. This program has been implemented by community agencies in more than 30 countries around the world, including Canada, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, Ethiopia, Peru and Gaza.
Dr. Jean Clinton is a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University, division of Child Psychiatry. She is also on staff at McMaster Children’s Hospital with cross appointments in Pediatrics and Family Medicine, and an associate in the Department of Child Psychiatry, University of Toronto and Sick Children’s Hospital. She is also a senior scientist at the Infant Child Health (INCH) Lab at McMaster University. In addition, she is a Fellow of the Child Trauma Academy. She has served as a consultant to children and youth mental health programs, child welfare, and primary care for almost 30 years. Dr. Clinton was recently appointed as an education advisor to the Premier of Ontario and the Minister of Education.
Dr. Clinton is renowned locally, provincially, nationally, and more recently internationally as an advocate for children’s issues. Her special interest lies in brain development, and the crucial role relationships and connectedness play therein. Dr. Clinton champions the development of a national, comprehensive child well-being strategy, including a system of early learning and care for all young children and their families. She is equally committed to ensuring that children’s and youth’s needs and voices are heard and respected.
Lisa Wolff is Director, Policy and Education at UNICEF Canada. She has worked in the organization for more than a decade leading education and policy focused work to advance the rights of Canada’s children to develop to their fullest potential, consistent with international human rights standards. Collaborating with government, institutions, civil society, researchers and private sector partners, Lisa has developed initiatives to advance children’s rights in policy, governance, child related programming and educational curricula. These include training programs, symposia, parliamentary engagement and other efforts to help ensure every childhood is a good one. Lisa is a member of the Board of Directors of PREVNet, the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children, and the North-South Partnership for First Nations Children.
She has a bachelor of environmental studies from University of Waterloo, a bachelor of education and master of education from the University of Toronto. Lisa received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal from the Governor-General of Canada in 2012.
The Honourable Landon Pearson (OC), served in the Senate of Canada (1994-2005), where she became known as the Children’s Senator, as well as the Senator for Children. She is a long-time advocate for the rights and well-being of children. Throughout her career, whether working with or on behalf of children at home and abroad, serving on various councils and commissions or in her role as a Canadian senator responsible for children, Landon Pearson has been an outspoken champion for children.
Upon her retirement from the Senate she was invited by Carleton University to establish the Landon Pearson Resource Centre for the Study of Childhood and Children’s Rights, a centre that will ensure that her years of work and her passion for children’s rights will continue to inspire others to carry her vision forward.
Mr. Christian Whalen is the deputy advocate and senior legal counsel at the New Brunswick Office of the Child and Youth Advocate. He is a native of Fredericton, New Brunswick (NB), and holds degrees from Carleton University (BA ’87), the University of New Brunswick (LLB ’89) and l’Université de Strasbourg III (D.E.A. ’92), as a French Government Scholar and Council of Europe Human Rights Fellow. Following his call to the bar, Mr. Whalen worked as a lawyer in private practice and as legal counsel to the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission before joining the Office of the Ombudsman in 2005.
He has been responsible for systemic investigations and acted as lead investigator on several reports of Ombudsman and the Child and Youth Advocate. He has served as acting child and youth advocate for the Province of New Brunswick (2011-2013). He was the founding chairperson of the first Children’s Law section within the Canadian Bar Association and is founder and director of the International Summer Course on the Rights of the Child at the Université de Moncton since 2011. In 2014 he received the Children’s Rights Champion Award from the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children and in 2015 was awarded the John Tait Award for distinguished service as public sector counsel by the Canadian Bar Association.
Dr. Lothar Krappmann was a member of the UN CRC from 2003-2011. He studied sociology, philosophy, and modern history at universities in Frankfurt and Cologne, and completed his doctorate in sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Until his retirement, he was a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Human Development in Berlin.
His main field of research is the social, emotional, and moral development of children in family, school, kindergarten and day care institutions, with special interests in vulnerable groups of children, particularly children growing up in poverty. He remains involved in a number of activities and programmes promoting citizenship education and children’s participation in kindergarten and school, and served on advisory boards to research institutions, social welfare organizations, and governmental agencies.
Dr. Ali Vaghri is an advance geophysical software developer with a doctoral degree in earth and ocean science from University of British Columbia. He has numerous years of experience as a geomatics engineer both nationally and internationally. He has been serving as a software developer at Arcis Seismic Solutions Corp, Calgary, since 2013. His main area of expertise is seismic studies although, as a result of years of program development in this field, he has become an expert in software development and seismic data analysis as well.
Ali has been acting as a senior advisor for the GlobalChild program since its inception in 2015. He was instrumental in developing the IT aspect of our first successful CIHR proposal (2015) that set up the foundation of this work.
