Author: Kevin Watkins, Executive Director, Overseas Development Institute (ODI)
(In this guest post, Kevin comments on this week’s big international development anniversary: the 25th anniversary of the signature of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. He’s not impressed)
This week marks an important anniversary in the human rights calendar. It’s now twenty five years since governments signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Stripped to its essentials the Convention is a promise to recognise and protect the human rights of children. The promise has been comprehensively broken.
For my part, I see the 25th anniversary less as a moment for celebration than as an opportunity to reflect on how we can work collectively – as researchers, campaigners, government reformers and international agencies – to deliver on its promise.
This is not to throw cold water on what has been achieved. The Convention is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. It has more signatories (193) than the UN has member states. Only Somalia and (you guessed it) the United States have not signed up.
Underpinning the Convention are principles and values that reflect the best of humanity. Its 54 articles and two additional protocols spell out in copious detail the human rights of children. The check list includes the right to survive, to be adequately nourished, to flourish through education, to be free from exploitation, and to be protected from arbitrary violence during armed conflict.
It all adds up to an impressive package – and it’s a package that has delivered results, as documented by the Chairperson of the Committee on the Rights of the Child and others in a recent UNICEF publication. Many governments around the world have adopted legislative provisions based on the Convention, especially in the field of child protection. It has supported some outstanding advocacy, including for a strengthened focus on inequality in the post-2015 goals. And while the role of rights in development is endlessly debated, the Convention is part of a system that makes a real difference in terms of access to things that matter – things like justice, essential medicines, and education. .
So why am I stuck with a bit of a downer on the Convention? Because the delivery is falling so far short of the promise and potential. In 1963, during his March on Washington speech, Martin Luther King likened the US constitution’s provisions on freedom to a ‘promissory note’ that had been returned to black Americans marked ‘insufficient funds’.
The same can be said of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Some 39,000 child brides are married each day – that’s 14 million a year. For many of them, forced marriage marks an abrupt end to education and the transition to a world of subjugation, exploitation and the health risks that come with early pregnancy – some 70,000 girls aged under 15 die each year from complications. The Convention (Article 28) ‘guarantees’ all children the right to an education. Yet 38 million primary school age children are not sitting in classrooms developing their talents, but working in hazardous labour conditions down mine shafts, in factories and fields where they are risking life and limb. Moreover, once seen as a ‘Third World’ problem, child trafficking and sexual exploitation are now global epidemics, with an estimated 5.5 million children living in modern slavery.
Then there is the issue of protecting children during armed conflict. This too is the subject of a protocol attached to the Convention. In fact, there is a whole raft of human rights provisions on this issue, ranging from the Geneva Convention to strictures on the protection of children against six grave violations of human rights, including indiscriminate violence and attacks on schools. Yet from Syria to South Sudan the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gaza, armed forces ignore international laws and human rights treaties – including the Convention – with impunity.
What does the Convention do to empower these children, or to hold the governments failing to protect their human rights to account?
Recent development experience also calls into question the degree to which governments take seriously their responsibility to act on the principle of non-discrimination. The good news of the past decade is the rapid progress that has been achieved in many dimensions of child well-being, including survival to education. Yet as I point out in my contribution to UNICEF’s 25th anniversary publication, in many cases disparities between children are widening. Failure to address the specific needs of the most disadvantaged and marginalised children is at the heart of the problem.
So, at the end of a long gripe what needs to be done? It strikes me that there are two broad reform processes that have to be set in train.
First, when it comes to the most persistent and egregious violations of rights we need a transition from soft law to hard law. The Convention provides principles, norms and values to which everyone should aspire. What it doesn’t provide is legal remedy and the threat of sanctions. If the Convention were backed by an International Court for Child Rights perhaps governments would take their obligations more seriously.
Second, the reporting and monitoring processes linked to the Convention should be strengthened. Governments are supposed to report to the Committee on the Rights of the Child every five years. Only 10 per cent manage to meet this requirement.
The Convention is no panacea. Legal systems alone cannot deliver the changes we need to see – as recent ODI research into legal empowerment, or the role of social norms in shaping girls’ opportunities, clearly shows.
But the Convention on the Rights of the Child matters for the same reason that human rights law matters. It enshrines the fundamental values and principles associated with the ideas of equal citizenship, equal opportunity and shared interests.
If we can’t act on these principles for children, we are all the poorer for our failure.
