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LATEST NEWS AND REPORTS
Migration, statelessness & trafficking
Over 100 stateless children born in Australia to migrants seeking asylum risk being sent to offshore detention centres. This follows the refusal by a federal court to give a refugee visa to an 11-month-old baby, known as baby Ferouz, who was declared an “unauthorised maritime arrival” despite being born in the country. Of the infants who face possible deportation, 31 are part of the persecuted Rohingya minority of Burma, while the families of 70 others are from countries including Afghanistan and Iraq. Lawyers working on baby Ferouz’s case said they will appeal the decision. In September, Australia’s immigration minister Scott Morrison introduced draft legislation that would give the government the power to deport Australian-born children along with their migrant parents.
A third of North African migrant children who arrived unaccompanied in Italy this year have disappeared from foster homes and state shelters, and local NGOs fear they are falling victim to sexual and labour exploitation. In one city in Sicily, advocates say that children from Eritrea are being picked up from parks and train stations, lured by promises of shelter and employment. Many of these children are thought to then be forced into selling drugs, prostitution and agricultural labour - all high-income activities for trafficking networks. According to local migrant rights activists, authorities are struggling to accommodate the multitude of incoming migrants, with unaccompanied children being left in overcrowded and decaying shelters for months, despite being meant to be relocated after 48 hours of arrival.
Privacy rights of children with parents in prison
Most children visiting parents in prison in Northern Ireland, United Kingdom will no longer have their photographs and fingerprints taken, following a High Court order citing a violation of children’s privacy rights. Until now, a Prison Service policy required child visitors aged between 12 and 15 to be finger-scanned, while 16- to 18-year-olds were both finger-scanned and photographed. Visitor identification and management was cited as one of the reasons for the process. But following the court order by Justice Treacy, the identification process will now be quashed for all children under 16. The decision comes in relation to the case of a 12-year-old girl, daughter of a republican prisoner, who was made to undergo the procedures during visits to her father. The High Court sided with the girl’s lawyers who argued that the measures were intrusive and disproportionate against a child who poses no security risk, as well as being incompatible with her right to privacy under the European Convention on Human Rights. Justice Treacy also ordered the destruction of all photographs and finger scans taken from the girl.
Other concerns relating to children of incarcerated parents worldwide include the importance of maintaining contact between children and their parents in prison and making visitation procedures child- and family-friendly. Worryingly in some States, children are altogether banned from visiting parents in prison, as is the case with Palestinian children over the age of eight who have a parent in one of Israel’s prisons.
Read more about the issues relating to children of incarcerated parents.
Indigenous consent & funding in Canada
A Canadian hospital in Ontario has gone to court to force the public child welfare authority - the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) - to intervene in the case of a Native girl who quit chemotherapy for leukaemia after 10 days of treatment, deciding instead to pursue traditional indigenous healing methods. McMaster Children's Hospital initiated legal action against CAS when it refused to remove the child from her family or take any action that would result in her going back to having chemotherapy. Also at issue, however, is whether the girl has the ability to make her own medical decisions, given that she herself has rejected the treatment: "I don't want medicine they were giving me in hospital … It made me really really sick. [It] hurt my belly for lots of days and my hair fell out. I know now that all those things happened to me because poison was being put in my body." Justice Gethin Edward of the Ontario Court of Justice suggested that there is a lack of cultural sensitivity in the case, saying that imposing cancer treatment and justifying its use based on survival statistics is “completely foreign” to aboriginal ways. He said physicians are essentially “impos[ing] our world view on First Nation culture.”
Meanwhile the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal is hearing closing arguments this week in a case of alleged racial discrimination against First Nations over the federal government’s underfunding of aboriginal child welfare agencies. Indigenous rights advocate Cindy Blackstock and the Assembly of First Nations claim funding levels for aboriginal welfare agencies is 22 percent lower than for non-aboriginal provincial agencies, despite First Nations carrying a far higher caseload of child welfare files. "This is a children's rights issue, not simply an issue about funding and jurisdictions," said Irwin Elman, Ontario’s Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth. "The result of the hearings will have a significant, real-life impact on thousands of First Nations children and youth in child welfare care or in the margins of care."
Armed conflict toll continues
At least 20 people, including eight children, have been killed in the second massacre in days in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the last two weeks, at least 70 people have been killed in the eastern border area in attacks “accompanied by rape, torture and mutilations", according to UN official Maurizio Giuliano. It is still unclear whether the Ugandan Islamist group the Allied Democratic Forces is responsible for the latest attack that took place in the town of Beni in the east of the country. Formed in 1996, the group has established links with Somalia's al-Shabab militants, according to a 2012 UN report.
Last week in Nigeria government officials said they had reached a ceasefire deal with the militant group Boko Haram, which included the release of 200 schoolgirls kidnapped in April by the group. However, Boko Haram has not confirmed the truce and reports of attacks continue. Attacks by the group, whose name roughly translates as "Western education is forbidden," has claimed an estimated 5,000 lives, while a further 300,000 displaced by the violence, according to the UN.
Meanwhile in a new report on the conflict in Ukraine, Amnesty International has accused both pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces of alleged war crimes.
Compensation for victims of clergy sex abuse
A judge in the United States has accepted a landmark settlement in a case that accused Catholic church leaders in Minnesota of creating a public nuisance by failing to warn parishioners about an abusive priest. The case against the Archdiocese of St Paul and Minneapolis and the Diocese of Winona is believed to be the first clergy abuse case in the US to use the public nuisance theory at trial. The plaintiff claims he was abused by the priest in question between 1976 and 1977 when he was an altar boy. The complaint also alleged the archdiocese and diocese were negligent in allowing the priest continued access to children, even though church leaders knew he had behaved inappropriately with young boys in the past. He was defrocked, but never criminally charged. The exact amount of the settlement has been kept confidential, but experts say it could cost the church tens of millions of dollars, with church officials considering bankruptcy.
Eleven former trainee priests in the United Kingdom have received compensation payments following allegations that they were sexually abused by Catholic priests during the 1960s and 70s. The Verona Fathers, a Roman Catholic Italian missionary order, paid the men a combined total of £120,000 for abuse that reportedly took place at St Peter Claver College in Yorkshire when most of the victims were teenagers. One was only 11 years old at the time. The men also called for accountability for the order’s subsequent failure to act. Now called the Comboni Missionaries, the order denied that the payments were an admission of liability. While three of the alleged abusers have since died, one of them is still living in the order’s mother house in Italy. More cases are pending, but the order denies that abuse was endemic.
Read more about CRIN’s campaign on ending sexual violence in religious institutions.
Police violence in DRC & China
Children were among those killed or disappeared during a police operation against armed gangs in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, between November 2013 and February 2014, according to a new UN report. At least 32 civilians were disappeared and nine killed in summary or extra-judicial executions by Congolese security forces during Operation “Likofi”. Investigators from the UN Joint Human Rights Office in DRC, who conducted the study, have warned that the total number killed could be far higher. The UN has called on the Congolese government to bring those responsible for these human rights violations to justice.
Meanwhile the authorities in Hong Kong, China have ramped up repression against pro-democracy protesters in recent days, with police using pepper spray and batons to keep down demonstrators. Rumours are also circulating that the authorities might block the city's mobile networks. In response to attempts to stifle their voices, students - who have been a strong force in the protests - are finding new ways to communicate, principally through the Firechat app. This allows smartphone users to communicate where no mobile signal or internet access is available, by using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and is particularly effective when used among large groups of people. When student leader 17-year-old Joshua Wong urged his movement to use it, the app drew 100,000 new users in Hong Kong in 24 hours.
Talks between student leaders and Beijing officials were held on Tuesday. But the Chinese government remains reluctant to consent to the protesters’ central demand: to remove restrictions on who can run in Hong Kong’s next leadership election in 2017.
Caste, gender & anti-gay discrimination
In India a 15-year-old goatherder belonging to the Dalit minority was lynched and burnt alive because his goat had strayed onto the field of someone from a higher landowning caste. India’s caste hierarchy still defines the lives of millions of people in India, with people from “lower” castes facing discrimination which has a major impact on their political, economic and cultural rights, according to the Dalit Solidarity Network. The latest incident happened in the eastern state of Bihar where the Dalits only make up 15 percent of the population, and where caste-related tensions have increased since a Dalit was appointed as the state’s chief minister earlier this year. The problem is nationwide, however, with caste becoming a factor in recent national elections as the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, comes from a poor family from the lower castes. Read a CRIN briefing on the caste system here.
A High Court judge in Kenya has ordered the parents of a six-year-old boy to cut his dreadlocks before he is allowed into school. The boy’s mother sued the Rusinga School in Nairobi after it made the same petition, claiming it discriminates against boys because only girls are allowed to wear dreadlocks, as well as on religious and cultural grounds because the boy's father is Jamaican and the dreadlocks are part of his culture. But judge Mumbi Ngugi dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the mother failed to convince the court that the cultural and religious rights of the boy had been violated: "The petitioner has not shown this court that the child practices Rastafarian religion, had she proved this, she could have persuaded this court."
A school principal in Spain is to stand trial for alleged discrimination for refusing to enrol a child because his parents are gay. In the boy’s application to the privately-run school in Seville, his parents indicated they were a same-sex couple, and were subsequently informed that no more places were available. But the couple became suspicious when other families told them that the school was admitting new students. When they reapplied without mentioning their family situation, the admissions office accepted the application. The presiding judges in the case say there is preliminary evidence to suggest that “the refusal to enrol the [child] was due to his parents’ sexual [orientation].”
The story of the CRC through artwork
CRIN has teamed up with artist Miriam Sugranyes to tell the story of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) through original artwork in an exhibition in London this week. The project is designed to open the viewer's mind to think differently about children and their place in society. 'Charitable' images of smiling or starving children do nothing to advance children's situation, and instead merely evoke a sense of pity and charity without confronting why children’s rights are violated all over the world. Children on death row, institutionalised child sexual abuse and the denial of basic civil and political rights are not cute issues. So why should children’s rights art be cute?
The exhibition forms part of the WHY? festival organised by London's Southbank Centre to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the CRC. It will be open from 23 to 26 October.
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ACCESS TO JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN IN THE MARSHALL ISLANDS
The status of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in the Marshall Islands is very weak. Although the CRC was ratified in 1993, it has not yet been incorporated into domestic law, therefore, it has no force of law and has never been used by the national courts. Children are only able to bring legal proceedings with the assistance of a representative. Legal aid is available in relation to both civil and criminal cases. Although a system of child-friendly procedures for children giving evidence exists in the criminal context, there are no equivalent provisions in relation to civil cases. A major concern is the lack of an institution competent to receive complaints of violations for children’s rights.
Read the full report on access to justice in the Marshall Islands.
This report is part of CRIN’s access to justice for children project, looking at the status of the CRC in national law, the status of children involved in legal proceedings, the legal means to challenge violations of children’s rights and the practical considerations involved in challenging violations.
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UPCOMING EVENTS
Child rights: 'Rights, Not Charity' - Artwork exhibition
Organisation: Miriam Sugranyes & CRIN
Date: 23-26 October 2014
Location: London, United Kingdom
Americas: 153rd Session of the IACHR
Organisation: Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
Date: 23 October - 7 November 2014
Location: Washington DC, United States
Social protection: Sixth International Policy Conference on the African Child
Organisation: African Child Policy Forum
Date: 27-28 October 2014
Location: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Child labour: Course on eliminating harmful practices in agriculture
Organisation: International Labour Organization
Date: 27-31 October 2014
Location: Turin, Italy
Europe: 'Senior Citizens and Young Children Building Age-Friendly Communities in Europe'
Organisation: TOY - Together Old & Young
Date: 28 October 2014
Location: Leiden, Netherlands
Poverty: Understanding child and youth poverty - Beyond ‘business as usual’
Organisation: Development Studies Association
Date: 1 November 2014
Location: London, United Kingdom
Child labour: Course on ‘Laws, policies and reporting tools - supporting the fight against child labour’
Organisation: International Labour Organization
Dates: 3-7 November 2014
Location: Turin, Italy
Street children: 'Do I count if you count me? A critical look at counting street-connected children'
Organisation: Consortium for Street Children
Date: 4 November 2014
Location: London, United Kingdom
Pro bono work: 2014 European Pro Bono Forum
Organisation: PILnet - Global Network for Public Interest Law
Date: 5-7 November 2014
Location: London, United Kingdom
Childhood poverty: Advancing equity for children - Perspectives from the ‘Young Lives’ study
Organisation: Equity for Children, The New School
Date: 5 November 2014
Location: New York City, United States
Protection: E-learning course on Child Safeguarding
Organization: HREA - Human Rights Education Associates
Dates: 5 November - 16 December 2014
Location: Online
Emergencies: E-learning course on Education in Emergencies
Organization: HREA - Human Rights Education Associates
Dates: 5 November - 16 December 2014
Location: Online
Gender: 2nd MenEngage Global Symposium 2014
Organisation: MenEngage
Date: 10-13 November 2014
Location: New Delhi, India
Childhood: 6th World congress on childhood and adolescence
Organisation: Various
Date: 12-14 November 2014
Location: La Puebla, Mexico
Children's rights: International conference - 25 Years CRC
Organisation: Leiden University et al.
Date: 17-19 November 2014
Location: Leiden, Netherlands
Courts: Children’s rights moot court competition
Organisation: Leiden University
Date: 18-20 November 2014
Location: Leiden, Netherlands
Palliative care: 2nd Congress on Paediatric Palliative Care
Organisation: Maruzza Foundation
Date: 19-21 November 2014
Location: Rome, Italy
Education: ‘The relevance of children's rights in a higher education context'
Organisation: Institute of Education, University of London
Date: 19 November 2014
Location: London, United Kingdom
Migrant detention: ‘End Immigration Detention of Children in Asia’ - Call for Film Submissions
Organisation: Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network
Date: 20 November 2014
Location: Bangkok, Thailand
Course: Master of Advanced Studies in Children’s Rights
Organisation: University Institute Kurt Bösch
Application deadline: 20 November 2014
Location: Sion, Switzerland
Investment: 'Children First - Better Public Spending for Better Outcomes for Children & Families'
Organisation: Eurochild
Date: 26-28 November 2014
Location: Bucharest, Romania
Juvenile justice: ‘Making deprivation of children’s liberty a last resort - Towards evidence-based policies & alternatives’
Organisation: International Juvenile Justice Observatory
Event date: 3-4 December 2014
Location: Brussels, Belgium
Discrimination: ‘Children’s right to non-discrimination’
Organisation: CREAN - Children’s Rights Erasmus Academic Network
Date: 4-5 December 2014
Location: Vilnius, Lithuania
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EMPLOYMENT
CRIN: Communications Intern (Spanish-speaking)
Location: N/A
Application deadline: 10 November 2014
CRIN: Communications Intern (French-speaking)
Location: N/A
Application deadline: Rolling deadline
Children's Rights Alliance for England: Director (maternity cover)
Location: London, United Kingdom
Application deadline: 27 October 2014
Consortium for Street Children: Advocacy Manager
Location: London, United Kingdom
Application deadline: 3 November 2014
Child Rights Connect: Director
Location: Geneva, Switzerland
Application deadline: 6 November 2014
LEAK OF THE WEEK
Calling things by their name is key to raising awareness about an issue and removing any taboos. Using softer, lukewarm words isn’t.
Take, for example, the case of “sex industry” vs “sex activities”. While the first is clear-cut and to-the-point, the latter is ambiguous. Nonetheless, a senior police official in Malaysia, Datuk Roslee Chik, has criticised a local NGO worker, Dr Hartini Zainuddin, for using the term “sex industry” in a recent documentary in reference to underage sex trafficking in the country.
With an estimated black market value of US$963 million, Malaysia’s illegal sex trade would appear to warrant the title of “industry”. But Ms Roslee Chik - apparently keen on preserving Malaysia’s public image - argues that it was inaccurate to use the word to describe the problem, because it implied that the profits derived from prostitution in Malaysia are as big as in Thailand, where prostitution is legal.
Unsurprisingly (except maybe to her!) Ms Roslee Chik was later criticised for attempting to whitewash the issue and showing a “lukewarm attitude” towards the problem.
The moral of the story: be pedantic about terminology, and call things by their name.
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