Nigel Cantwell

International Consultant on Child Protection Policies (Schweiz), Genf

Kurzvita:
Nigel Cantwell is a Geneva-based consultant on child protection policies and has been working on issues related to upholding children’s rights in intercountry adoption for over 30 years.
It was while coordinating the NGO Group that helped to shape the CRC during the 1980s that he developed a special concern over rights violations in the context of children’s adoption abroad. He has undertaken over a dozen field assessments of adoption and alternative care systems, mostly for UNICEF and ISS, in countries ranging from Romania to Guatemala, Sierra Leone and Viet Nam.
Nigel spent six years at UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre in Florence (1997-2003), and remains UNICEF’s designated expert to sessions of the Special Commission that reviews the practical operation of the 1993 Hague Convention, as well as to expert meetings at The Hague on specific aspects of intercountry adoption.
Nigel lectures at the Universities of Geneva and Leiden. Among his writings on this topic is “The Best Interests of the Child in Intercountry Adoption” (UNICEF, 2014).

Foto: Claudine Sauvain