A children’s rights campaigner and former Unicef consultant has been jailed for abusing a 12-year-old boy.

Peter Newell, 77, managed a charity that received hundreds of thousands of pounds from the NSPCC, Barnardo’s, Save the Children and Unicef.

He was jailed last month at Blackfriars crown court after admitting five charges relating to the rape and indecent assault of a boy under 16 over a three-year-period in the 1960s.

Newell, from north London, wrote a manual on children’s rights for Unicef and was the co-ordinator of the Association for the Protection of All Children charity, known as Approach, until he resigned in 2016 when the allegations arose.

Approach operates through the Children Are Unbeatable! Alliance in the UK and lobbies for the protection of children from violence, including smacking by parents.

In 2015, the charity brought a complaint to the Council of Europe, the EU’s leading human rights organisation, against France and six other EU countries over their failure to explicitly ban smacking children.