Health is a vital aspect of all human rights. Doctors, nurses, dentists, surgeons, and specialists like pediatricians, nutritionists and mental health professionals, all play a significant role in a child’s life helping them to grow up healthy.
Since medical professionals play such an important, and even frequent role in people’s lives, they have a particular ability to influence a person’s quality of life and whether their human rights are respected.
This extends beyond the right to life and the right to health. For instance, medical professionals are in positions of power, which they must not abuse, and it is important that children can trust and respect them. Medical professionals should ensure that children can access confidential advice that respects their right to privacy, have access to information about their health (including sexual and reproductive health) and can give informed consent for any procedure or treatment when they have capacity.
Respect for children’s views also need to be built into healthcare services. Involving children will help ease any anxieties they might have, and knowing that no action will be taken without their knowledge and consent will help them feel more confident and encourage them to cooperate in the treatment.
Medical professionals also play a role in criminal justice systems around the world, deciding when someone is “fit” for the death penalty or other inhuman sentences. In over 40 countries, children can still be subjected to inhuman sentences including death, life imprisonment and corporal punishment (eg whipping, flogging, caning or amputation). CRIN’s research into the laws authorising inhuman sentencing in many States shows that they require the involvement of medical practitioners. Yet international standards of medical ethics condemn such involvement. For more information on this join our campaign to end the inhuman sentencing of children.
We want a world where governments and societies view and treat children as rights holders - not simply as the future in need of protection and charity, or merely an extension of their parents. We want to work with medical professionals to achieve this goal. Please email us for further information and advice, or to give us feedback on our work and how we can better help you protect and promote children’s rights.
Resources for you
We have also produced a guide to applying a rights based approach to children for health professionals. A rights based approach comes from the notion that children are rights holders, and that for real change to happen the focus must be on promoting and protecting their rights - not just treating them as objects of charity. The guide for health professionals includes information on how the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) applies to your field, which includes more than the right to health, and includes privacy, confidentiality the right to be heard and more. It is not designed to tell you how to do your job, but rather to give you the tools to understand how children’s rights fit into it.
Below are some children’s rights additional resources tailored to medical professionals. We are developing more all the time, and updating and adding to existing resources. Please email us with your feedback on these, as well as suggestions for further resources we could look to produce.