New steering committee launched to to strengthen child protection and child justice

Child protection and child justice are being given tremendous importance by the Government, with the establishment of a new steering committee aimed at strengthening coordination among the agencies responsible for safeguarding children and ensuring their access to justice.  The Child Protection and Justice Steering Committee was officially launched today as a new national coordination mechanism bringing together key players from across Belize’s child protection and justice systems. Attorney General Anthony Sylvestre says the importance of protecting children and ensuring an effective child justice system guided the Government’s decision to establish the committee. He explained that collaboration among multiple agencies will allow the Government to consider the various factors that come into play when making decisions that affect children. He noted that a work plan has already been drafted to guide the committee and ensure a more efficient and coordinated approach.

Anthony Sylvester, Attorney General: “There are various areas that they will be targeting and one of the things that they’ll be doing is that they’re providing to the government certain recommendations with respect to policies that need to be revamped and need to be tweaked. And a part of the membership on this committee includes the Attorney General’s Ministry and so that helps in terms of ensuring that in a more timely manner we’ll be able to have legislation which touch and concern families and children that those are able to be addressed and again in a more timely manner we’ll be able to have the concerns and the needs with respect to the judiciary and specifically to your question cases that address children that, those could be could be addressed in a more timely and effective manner. It’s a large committee. I know people at times they caution about large committee but what I can say is that this particular committee has been doing excellent work and the development of this work plan is the proof positive of that.”

This initiative follows recommendations from the 2024 National Child Protection System Evaluation, conducted by the Ministry of Human Development through the Department of Human Services in collaboration with UNICEF Belize. That assessment identified opportunities to improve coordination, accountability and strategic alignment among the agencies working in these areas.  Minister of Human Development, Family Support and Gender Affairs Thea Garcia Ramirez says the creation of the steering committee involved amalgamating existing mechanisms in an effort to eliminate duplication and ensure that agencies are not working separately toward the same objectives. She says bringing the key players around one table will improve coordination and allow for a more unified response to issues involving vulnerable children and those who come into contact with the justice system.

Thea Garcia Ramirez, Minister of Human Development: “The steering committee is really needed because it’s an amalgamation of two separate committees that had pretty much a lot of areas where they intersected and the mandates were pretty much the same. So now you have child protection coming together. I think that there was a big evaluation made that highlighted a lot of what we got right but a lot of where the gaps were. And so for those people wanting to know basically what this committee does is to ensure that we do a lot more prevention, which is one of the gaps and why we’re a lot lacking. Prevention is better than cure. It makes better sense to have early interventions and it even makes more economic and financial sense. With early interventions, the price tag on those are a lot lower than dealing with crises that have to do with social issues later on. And so when we intervene early in childhood education, we look at why and try to work on poverty that affects children, especially children in indigenous populations, children with different abilities. So those are the children that especially are vulnerable. And when we have early childhood interventions that makes sure that we have better outcomes as children grow into adulthood we have more productive citizens. It’s far easier to do that, to prevent than to then end up with a lot of social issues that are much harder to deal with, more complex to deal with and more expensive to deal with as the lifespan of the person goes forward. So that is in essence what we’re trying to do here.”

The committee is expected to guide coordination across the two systems and support the Government’s broader objective of ensuring that every child in Belize is protected, supported and afforded access to justice through a coordinated, child-centred approach.