CHILDREN’S RIGHTS
If anything reflects the terrible miseries of the world in all their harshness it is the massive infringement of children’s rights in enormous areas of the planet. No international community task is therefore more urgent than the taking of steps to protect the rights of girls and boys in any part of the world.
The conviction that children represent humanity’s greatest asset is not only deep and unquestionable, but constitutes one of the most important conquests of the 20th century. That’s why it’s no surprise that the Covenant on Children’s Rights (1989), an extension of the earlier Declaration on Children’s Rights (1959), is the human rights agreement to have received the greatest backing in history: 192 countries have ratified it (there are only two absences: the USA, which has signed the document without ratifying it, and Somalia).
But in this, as in other cases, reality is far cry from fulfilling the ideals expressed in declarations and protocols. The infringement of children’s rights due to poverty, exploitation or war nevertheless appears before our eyes with a dramatic addition of the violent treatment of the weakest and least able to defend themselves, beings who are moreover the trustees of a future corrupted from a very early age by their suffering.
The figures speak for themselves. Since the Covenant was written and signed (1989), the effect of war on boys and girls has increased instead of decreasing. Two million children have died since then (half of them the victims of war) and another six million have been seriously wounded or are handicapped for life. Over 300,000 have been obliged to join the ranks and files of armies or rebel groups, particularly in Africa and Asia, and to participate, not only in the fighting, but in tasks like spying, searching for mines or even suicide attacks. Girls are also often systematically raped, or are converted into the sex slaves of the troops or militias. Girls and boys moreover constitute 50% of those who are displaced and seek refuge as a result of armed conflict.
According to data issued by the International Labour Organisation, no less than 400 million boys and girls are forced to work either full or part-time; of these, 250 million do so in conditions of “exploitation”. An exploitation which in the demented repertoire of abuse includes pornography and prostitution, often linked to the sex tourism practiced by citizens from rich countries. At least a million boys and girls are converted into sex products the world over, most of them in Asia and the remainder in Latin American and Europe.
Nor do the education rates meet the most elementary minimums for an enormous number of boys and girls. 128 million children of primary school age receive no schooling whatsoever, thus condemning them to a life of poverty and marginalisation. We should also point out that illiteracy is even higher among girls, who often suffer double exclusion because of their sex and are obliged to do household tasks or even get a job.
The poor or virtually non-existent health service, almost always linked to seriously unhealthy conditions, is another of the problems suffered by childhood. 500,000 boys and girls die every year the world over simply because they lack basic hygiene conditions. And vaccination or access to medicines is, in many places, nothing but a dream.
The ravages of AIDS are atrocious, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where millions of boys and girls die every year after having lost their fathers and mothers to the same disease and almost without ever having received the right treatment due to the inability of impoverished countries to pay for its cost.
Poverty, war and disease, linked to one another in a miserable circle, therefore cause the exclusion of a large part of the world’s children from a minimum standard of living and development, hence condemning them to suffering and often to death.
In the face of such a serious infringement of children’s rights, the commitment of the Millennium Development Goals, drawn up at the world summit in September 2005, and including the objectives of ensuring that all children in the world are receiving schooling by 2015, reducing the mortality rate of boys and girls under the age of five by two thirds, and promoting equality between genres, is an initiative as essential as it is insufficient. In addition to putting every effort into truly meeting these Goals, the international community, and specifically the rich countries, must introduce more ambitious development policies and, above all, assign more resources to the priority task of guaranteeing that all boys and girls benefit from their due rights.