Philip E. Veerman

Philip Edmond Veerman (born 28 June 1948) is a Dutch health psychologist and children's rights scholar. He is the author of The Rights of the Child and the Changing Image of Childhood, a comparative study of twentieth-century declarations and conventions on children's rights, and initiated the founding of the International Journal of Children's Rights.

He founded DCI-Israel, the Israeli section of Defence for Children International (DCI), which he directed for seventeen years, and served as President of DCI's International Executive Council in Geneva from 1997 to 2002. In 2015 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau.

Early life Veerman was born in Amsterdam in 1948 into a Jewish family. Most of his family did not survive the Holocaust; his father was active in the Dutch resistance, helping to operate an escape route to Switzerland. After returning, he established three family-group homes in Amsterdam and in 1972, founded the Stichting Browndale Nederland to introduce the model more broadly in the Netherlands.

In 1988, he moved to Israel and established DCI-Israel, the Israeli section of Defence for Children International. The organisation operated on an apolitical basis, with both Jewish and Arab Israelis on its board and staff. During this period he co-authored articles on Israeli–Palestinian civil society cooperation in the Palestine-Israel Journal. In 2003, he helped establish a DCI section in Sierra Leone, and he took part in advocacy for the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (2000), which raised age limits for the recruitment and use of children in hostilities.

Academic work Veerman analysed the historical development of children's rights and evolving perceptions of childhood in his book The Rights of the Child and the Changing Image of Childhood (1992). Reviewing it in the International Journal of Children's Rights, Michael Freeman criticised the book's length, its dissertation-like style and its reliance on Samuel Shye's systemic quality-of-life model, but called it "an invaluable source" of documents and analysis, and predicted that Veerman would come to be counted among the pioneers of children's rights.

In 1992, Veerman co-edited The Ideologies of Children's Rights with Michael Freeman, published in the same series. In 1993, he initiated the founding of the International Journal of Children's Rights, published by Brill. and co-author of a commentary on Article 33 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Honours In 2015, Veerman was appointed an Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau, in recognition of his work on children's rights.