Convention’s aim to protect children

Press, 6 December 1989, Page 57

Convention’s aim to protect children

.NZPA-Reuter New York After 10 years of negotiations and controversy, the United Nations General Assembly has unanimously adopted the first Convention on the Rights of the Child, creating the most comprehensive treaty in history for the protection of children. The convention draws together in a single document the key provisions of existing international declarations affecting children. It breaks new ground on adoption, survival, protection from sexual exploitation and drug abuse. More than 38,000 children die every day from hunger, or lack of shelter and health care, and more than 100 million are estimated to be living on the streets of the world’s cities, abandoned by their families, according to United Nations reports.

"You have taken the first seminal step ... to furnish the world’s children with the means of assuring their fundamental rights,” the Secretary-General, Mr Javier Perez de Cuellar, told the assembly. A special signing ceremony will be held in January for states to ratify the convention, which then makes the provisions of the treaty binding on the signatories and requires them to report to the United Nations monitoring group. Twenty states have to ratify the convention before it becomes international law.

Originally proposed by Poland, the 54-article document is a finely honed compromise between various cultures and political views that leaves enough room for differences on religion, adoption and other issues.

Consequently, many countries have severe reservations on some of the clauses. Some feel the minimum age of 15 for military service is too low. Antiabortion groups wanted the foetus recognised as a person and Islamic states have their own interpretation of freedom of religion. The Nordic countries failed to get the military age raised to at least 17 while the United States, in spite of protests from citizens’ groups, argued that raising the combat age would undermine the 1949 Geneva conventions on that issue and should not be discussed in this forum. On the abortion issue, a paragraph in the preamble speaks of the right to legal protection before as well as after birth, but references to the unborn child were dropped from the operative

articles of the convention. Chile and Paraguay objected strongly to this omission while the United States only mentioned it in passing, in spite of heavy lobbying from right-to-life groups. Another point of no consensus came from a number of Islamic countries, including Jordan, Iran and Algeria, which said they interpreted the child’s right to freedom of religion to mean it had freedom to practice religion but not to change its religion. In spite of all the cultural differences, the convention assumes that the reactions of all countries are the same when children are subjected to torture, separated from their families, deprived of food or maimed in combat. The convention acknowledges -that not only does a child have

the right to be adequately nourished, it also has the right to be properly educated and shielded from, arbitrary detention, exploitation at work or abuse in the home. Some critics dismiss the treaty as “another useless piece of international legislation.” They say the treaty will be ignored by many of the countries that eventually ratify it. “It will go the same way as the five-year-old Convention on Torture,” said one Third World diplomat who said that torture went on unabated in at least 70 countries, according to human rights organisations. Promoters of the convention strongly disagree. “Things will obviously not change overnight but governments that ratify the convention will automatically incorporate it

into their own Taws and will be under strong pressure to abide by it,” said Claire Brisset, spokeswoman at the European headquarters of the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef). A Committee on the Rights of the Child made up of experts would be set up and countries will report on steps they have taken to comply with the charter, she . said. A country with a massive child prostitution problem, for instance, will simply have to take action once it has ratified the treaty,” she said. Ms Brisset said the convention filled a gap as provisions relevant to children were scattered through 80 international treaties and declarations. “Now we have everything in a single document.”