RIGHTS: UN Plans Special Session on Children

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 3 2000 (IPS) - The United Nations, alarmed by the exploitation of millions of children worldwide, will take up their cause at a Special Session of the General Assembly next year.

“The major challenge was not just to recognise children in legislation, but in implementing that legislation,” says Ambassador Patricia Durrant of Jamaica, who chaired the Preparatory Committee for the 1990 World Summit for Children.

Since that summit in New York 10 years ago, millions of children have been exploited and continue to be exploited – economically, militarily and sexually.

A landmark UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the General Assembly in November 1989, has been ratified by 191 of the 193 countries, with the United States and Somalia as the only exceptions.

But despite this nearly universal ratification, millions of children receive no education, work long hours under hazardous conditions or are forced into war as child soldiers.

Durrant says that the goals of the World Summit for Children had not been attained either. Because of conflict and dissent, she points out, children have not been able to enjoy their legitimate rights.

The Special Session, scheduled to take place in New York in the summer of 2001, would contribute to improving the lives of children, she added.

Addressing a meeting of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) last week, Durrant said that the 1990 summit had brought together leaders from all over the world. There had been unprecedented consensus for a number of reasons.

First, the well-being of children was a subject on which all parties could agree. Secondly, the summit’s outcome had been concise and the plan of action had clearly spelled out what was expected at the national and international level.

The consensus in favour of children, she said, had led to the ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, although it had been adopted a year before the summit. The Convention, she said, eventually became the most rapidly and broadly ratified international treaty in history.

The promises held out by the Convention include children’s right to life; to be free from discrimination; to be protected in armed conflicts; to be protected from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; and the rights to education, health care, an adequate standard of living, and freedom from economic exploitation and other abuse.

But in a report released last November, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said the Convention had really delivered far less than it promised.

“For too many children, the promises of the Convention remain hollow, and the abuses they endure every day contradict the commitments made by governments,” said Lois Whitman, executive director of the Children’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.

“The international community has failed its children,” she asserted.

In a 32-page report titled “Promises Broken,” Human Rights Watch said that countless children around the world were routinely denied their basic human rights despite pledges made by signatories and state parties to the Convention.

“The US failure to ratify this convention is inexcusable,” Whitman said, “What kind of message does this send? It undermines the US’s credibility as a nation that cares about children.”

Human Rights Watch also said that notwithstanding the much- ballyhooed Convention, there were 300,000 children in more than 30 countries who were participating in military conflicts worldwide, serving on the front lines of combat, as spies, messengers, porters and human mine detectors, and subject to injury, disability, psychological trauma and death.

The Office of the UN Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict says that in the past decade alone, about 2 million children have been killed in armed conflicts.

Additionally, 12 million were left homeless, and half of the world’s estimated 53 million refugees and internally displaced persons are children, often orphaned.

Meanwhile, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has been involved in demobilising child soldiers in several recent conflict situations – in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Geneva-based International Labour Organisation (ILO) has estimated that 250 million children, between the ages of five and 14, work in developing countries – at least 120 million of them full-time.

Sixty-one percent of these were in Asia, 32 percent in Africa and seven percent in Latin America. Most working children in rural areas were found in agriculture; urban children work in trade and services, some in manufacturing, construction and domestic service, ILO said.