Office of the Ombudsman, Samoa‘s National Human Rights Institution Submission to the Committee on the Rights of the Child – September 2015 1 Introduction 1. This submission was prepared by the Office of the Ombudsman, Samoa, which is Samoa‘s National Human Rights Institution (NHRI). It provides information to the Committee on the Rights of the Child regarding the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (the Convention) in Samoa for the period 2006-2015. 2. Given that the NHRI only received its human rights mandate in 2013, it does not, as yet, have the capacity to provide an extensive and thorough report on the implementation of all the obligations under the Convention. As the NHRI‘s capacity and resources develop so will its capacity to comprehensively report on Samoan Government‘s implementation of all the rights and obligations contained under the Convention. 3. In light of this, this report is based on the information and data which formed the basis of the NHRI‘s first State of Human Rights Report (SHRR), which was submitted to the Samoan Parliament on 30 June 2015. The NHRI collected data through surveying, consultation and focus groups, including via the NHRI‘s Human Rights Survey 2014-15 (the Survey), which collected a total of 2515 surveys that sampled an age range between 10 and 88. In addition to data obtained in the course of the SSHR, this report is also based upon information collected during the NHRI‘s first program of inspections of places of detention, undertaken in January 2015. 4. The report aims to highlight various children‘s rights issues which are prevalent in Samoa, as well as inform the Committee about how the fa’asamoa (the Samoan way of life) influences these issues and the protection of children‘s rights in Samoa in general. The report makes recommendations to the Samoan Government with regarding how it can better meet its obligations under the Convention and ensure that the rights of the child are fully protected in Samoa. 2 National Developments 5. Since the Committee‘s last CRC Periodic Review of Samoa in 2006, the Government has attempted to address many of the recommendations that were contained within the Committee‘s Concluding Observations. 6. One of the key developments in the protection and promotion of human rights in Samoa is the establishment of the Office of the Ombudsman as the National Human Rights Institution (the NHRI). The NHRI‘s functions include, but are not limited to, the power to ‗monitor and promote compliance with international and domestic human rights law including...providing information to the international human rights system, including the Human Rights Council and its 4