Submission on the nature of the rights of tamariki Māori to the United Nations Committee on the Rights on the Child

Te Wai Ariki participated in the CRC Committee’s pre-sessional working group dialogue on New Zealand in September 2022 to speak to the report.

The Centre’s key positions put forward in this report are that:

• Tamariki Māori (Māori children) hold unique rights and protections that are especial to tamariki Māori as the tangata whenua (people of the land) of Aotearoa New Zealand in accordance with te ao Māori (the Māori worldview), including, in particular, tikanga Māori (Māori laws and customs); as partners to te Tiriti o Waitangi (Te Tiriti); and, as Indigenous children, to whom all rights as Indigenous peoples under international law, including the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (the Indigenous Declaration), attach;
• The New Zealand Government has specific duties and obligations to tamariki Māori due to these unique rights and protections that are additional to the duties and obligations the Government owes to all children of Aotearoa New Zealand.
• The rights of tamariki Māori are sourced first and foremost in te ao Māori, including tikanga Māori, and te Tiriti. These sources should always be the first point of reference when making determinations about the well-being of tamariki Māori, what is in their best interests and whether the New Zealand Government is meeting its obligations to them;
• Once it is accepted that te ao Māori, including tikanga Māori, and te Tiriti are the starting point, key international instruments, like the Indigenous Declaration and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (the CRC), can then be drawn on to further strengthen and develop the rights of tamariki Māori and identify the extensive duties and obligations that the New Zealand Government owes to them.
• The New Zealand Government has failed to recognise the unique rights of tamariki Māori or the specific duties it owes to them. Both in the past and the present, the rights of tamariki Māori as tangata whenua, Tiriti partners and Indigenous children have been systematically overlooked and unfulfilled; and
• The New Zealand Government is obliged to do more than simply improve the situation for tamariki Māori so they are on equal footing with non-Māori children in Aotearoa New Zealand. Instead, the New Zealand Government must ensure that, in addition to realising the rights of tamariki Māori as children under the CRC, their unique rights as te Tiriti partner and Indigenous children, and the guarantees made to Māori under te Tiriti, including to tino rangatiratanga (self-determination, authority), and the Indigenous Declaration, including to self-determination, are realised.
• We hope that this analysis, and starter list of questions that we provide in this report, assists the CRC Committee, and others, to better assess the specific rights of tamariki Māori and interrogate whether the New Zealand Government is meeting their specific duties to tamariki Māori.

The full report is available here: