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HUMAN RIGHTS: Children Bring Truce in UN Council

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Mar 22 2007 (IPS) - Children’s rights was one issue on which the 47 members of the United Nations Human Rights Council have been able to reach a consensus this week, setting aside the differences that have marked their debates in the current session in Geneva.

The discussions of the intergovernmental working group set up by the Council to design the Universal Periodic Review mechanism, which will carry out assessments of each country’s fulfilment of its human rights obligations and commitments, have been hung up on disagreements.

When it created the Council a year ago, the U.N. General Assembly decided that the new body would carry out universal human rights reviews of all countries, without exception, in order to eradicate the bias and unequal treatment that destroyed the credibility of the now-defunct Commission on Human Rights.

But the same discrepancies and differences – mainly between industrialised and developing nations – that undermined the Commission have cropped up again in the drafting of the Universal Periodic Review mechanism.

For instance, several nations of the developing South have proposed that levels of development and specific characteristics of countries be taken into account in the reviews.

But members of the Western Group argue that all countries have the duty to promote and protect human rights, regardless of their political, economic or cultural systems or characteristics.

The differences run even deeper when it comes to the question of the participation of non-governmental organisations in the review process.

The African Group, represented by Algeria, says civil society organisations should only be allowed to take part at the national level. That would mean NGOs would be excluded from the final debate in the Council.

But several industrialised nations are staunchly opposed to the exclusion of NGOs.

In that climate, and in the framework of its current session, running Mar. 12-30, the Council began on Monday to hold a special debate on the report by an independent U.N. expert calling for a wide range of measures to combat violence against children.

The report by Brazilian academic Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro was presented to the U.N. General Assembly in October 2006 after a period of consultations with specialised U.N. agencies and civil society bodies. In September, the expert will present the General Assembly with a follow-up study on progress made in the area.

Perhaps the most outstanding aspect of the debate on Pinheiro’s report in the Council was that the member states set aside their differences and gave consensus support to the conclusions presented by Pinheiro and the representatives of U.N. agencies.

“For me it was fantastic,” Pinheiro told IPS. “In the General Assembly the same thing happened. And that’s because this is a real and genuine issue” on which the national delegations are well-prepared and want to demonstrate that they are making progress.

In his report, the expert presented general recommendations for integrating measures to prevent and respond to violence against children in national planning processes.

He also offered concrete recommendations for working in various settings: the home, the community, schools, detention centres or shelters, and workplaces.

Pinheiro’s mandate did not include the question of children in armed conflicts. However, his report did outline the different aspects of that problem and examined the case of the occupied Palestinian territories in particular, he said.

His starting premise is that no kind of violence against children is justified, and that children should never receive less protection than adults.

All violence against children can be prevented, and states have the responsibility to enforce children’s rights to protection and access to services, he said. They must also help support families in their capacity to provide care to children in a safe environment, he added.

In his report, Pinheiro suggested that a special representative on violence against children be named.

The representative would give priority to the report’s recommendations, such as strengthening legal frameworks and internal mechanisms within each country, promoting the participation of children and structures through which they are able to make their demands heard, and strengthening data collection and research, he said, underlining that it would be an arduous but urgent job.

Cécile Trochu, in charge of the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) children’s rights programme, told IPS that the idea of establishing a special representative on violence against children “is supported by many NGOs.”

The new representative’s mission is not yet defined, but would probably include receiving cases of abuse, issuing urgent appeals to countries, and also carrying out fact-finding missions in the field, Trochu said.

The U.N. human rights system’s present mechanisms to deal with violence against children do not cover abuse in the home or in institutions, including penal institutions, she added.

With regard to torture, the OMCT issued numerous urgent appeals in 2006 denouncing the rape of girls in Africa, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), and extrajudicial executions of children, the expert said.

The idea of appointing a special representative on violence against children was supported by delegates from several countries who participated in the debate on Pinheiro’s report. Uruguay’s representative Pauline Davies said that violence against children was an example of the gaps in the Council’s special procedures system.

Special procedures were created by the former Commission on Human Rights, and consisted in the designation of groups of experts, or individual representatives, who were put in charge of examining and reporting on the state of particular human rights issues, and of entire countries in critical situations.

The Council provisionally extended the special procedure mechanisms, but ordered a review of the present mandates which is under way, albeit amid controversy, and should be completed by June.

A member of the Uruguayan delegation, who requested anonymity, told IPS that Davies’s comment about the gap in the special procedures in relation to violence against children referred to the absence of coverage of this specific issue.

It would therefore be possible to consider creating a mechanism to cover this particular aspect, he said.

The Uruguayan delegate noted that that there is a special rapporteur concerned with the sale of children, child prostitution and the use of children in pornography; another for the area of human trafficking, especially women and children; a third on violence against women, including its causes and consequences; and finally, a special rapporteur on child soldiers involved in armed conflicts.

In the working group sessions reviewing the mandates, many delegations are primarily concerned with detecting duplicate and overlapping mandates, which was one of the problems in the Commission on Human Rights that drew the most criticism, the source said.

In contrast, “we consider that the main concern should be to detect the aspects of human rights that are not covered by the mechanisms,” the source said. Existing mandates on the sale of children and child pornography and on child soldiers in armed conflicts do not necessarily imply duplication or overlapping, the delegate insisted.

These are cases of complementary mandates within the special procedures, the Uruguayan delegate said.

The source said that the prominent participation of the Uruguayan delegation in preparing the debate over Pinheiro’s report – which was highlighted by Council President Luis Alfonso de Alba – was consistent with the South American country’s policy. For the last 10 years Uruguay has sponsored resolutions on children’s rights, at the U.N. headquarters in Geneva and at the General Assemblies in New York.

However, in this particular case Uruguay is acting as representative for the Latin America and Caribbean Group (GRULAC), which is negotiating the text of draft resolutions in conjunction with the European Union, the delegate said.

With respect to the situation of children in Latin America, the problem is that the transition from military dictatorships to democracy that has occurred in most countries in the 1980s and 1990s did not bring greater democratic rights to children and adolescents, Pinheiro told IPS.

At home, the region’s children are still subject to authoritarian control, he said. Political democracy did not liberate the children, or grant them recognition as citizens. That is what democracy should do, but its scope is still very limited, he said.