Hundreds of child refugees are to be brought to the United Kingdom from the “Jungle” refugee camp in Calais, France, during the coming weeks. However, there remains strong opposition from many local councils in England with 38 of 156 refusing to take part in the resettlement. Around 200 children have been brought to Britain in recent days, including 60 girls under the Dubs amendment, designed to protect vulnerable child refugees across Europe. A total of 1,918 residents of the camp, including 300 children, passed through the official registration centre on Monday before taking buses to regions all over France. However, there are an estimated 8,000 people remaining in the camp who are still to be processed, mainly from Afghanistan, Syria, Eritrea and Sudan and the population of the camp continues to grow as States argue over who should take in asylum-seekers and economic migrants.

Syrian refugee children have been found working in Turkish factories making clothes for a number of high street retailers in the United Kingdom, an investigation by the BBC has found. Syrian refugees as young as 15 were found working long hours for little pay, making and ironing clothes to be shipped to Britain. Some work 12-hour days, often using chemicals with inadequate protection. Turkey has been a main entry point for refugees from the ongoing conflict in Syria, with three million estimated to be living there. The BBC investigation follows a recent surveyby the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre of 38 major UK brands with factories in Turkey examining their supply chains and the steps they are taking to protect vulnerable refugee workers from exploitation. It found that while some brands treated refugees with respect, the majority were doing too little and the vast majority of Syrian refugees working there did so without legal protections making them vulnerable to abuse.

Sixty-one million children in China’s countryside - more than a third of those younger than 17 - are living without day-to-day care from their parents, a survey has found. These children, often called China’s “left-behind children,” do not see their migrant worker parents who have sought work in the coastal cities. While Chinese cities need the labour of migrant workers, municipal authorities and big cities like Beijing often deny their children essential services such as schooling and health care. The low incomes and poor housing conditions of migrant workers make it all but impossible for children to accompany their parents to the cities. The problem of left-behind children is most severe in the Anhui, Henan and Sichuan provinces, the largest sources of migrant workers where 44 percent of rural children live without their mother or father.
 

The UK government's Prevent strategy is targeting a broad swath of children who have no links to terrorism, according to a new report by Open Society Justice Initiative. The report calls on the government to repeal the statutory duty on teachers and health professionals to identify children vulnerable to radicalisation and take action in such cases. Interviews with parents, as well as education and health professionals brought to light a series of examples in which children have been inappropriately singled out and referred to the ‘Channel’ programme set up to deal with those displaying early signs of “radicalisation”. However, training received by teachers has reportedly included indicators of children’s “radicalisation” such as strong political beliefs, changes in the way they dress and a drop in grades. Such broad indicators may have serious implications for children’s freedom of expression and right to privacy. In March the National Union of Teachers backed a motion calling for Prevent to be scrapped and in July Parliament's joint committee on human rights called for an independent review of the strategy.

The situation in the UK reflects a global problem. With terrorist acts making the news almost every day, the threat of terrorism and the means to fight it have become a key concern for policy makers, law enforcement agencies and the population in general. Terrorism and counter-terrorism measures have devastating consequences for human rights, but their impact on children is heightened because of their age and the fact that they are left out of the debates around preventing terrorism and radicalisation. In asubmission to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, CRIN asserts that governments have a responsibility to protect those within their jurisdiction from terrorist attacks, but cautions that any attempt to counter terrorism raises the question of its compatibility with international human rights law and standards. It argues that government responses to fear of terrorism and radicalisation result in excessive measures that infringe a whole range of human rights, whether this is through a vague or overbroad definition of terrorist acts or by granting excessive powers to law enforcement agencies.  

Chinese authorities in the northwestern region of Xinjiang have made it an offence for parents to "force their children to participate in religious activities” in a thinly veiled attack on the region’s Uighur Muslim community. The new provision, an amendment to its regional Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency Law 2012, assumes a connection between religion and separatism, extremism and terrorism. It requires children found taking part in religious activities to be sent to "specialised schools for correction", assigning criminal responsibility to parents, teachers and other adults. The head of the politics and law office of the municipal education department said that "If anybody under 18 prays, fasts, learns religion, or follows someone to pray ... these [actions] are all deemed illegal", indicating a failure to recognise that children have a right to freedom of religion or belief independent of their parents. The new law also issues guidelines for the region's schools, requiring them to "guide minors to consciously resist ethnic separatism, extremism and terrorism".

 

Health

A new report from the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons and Dutch NGO PAX has revealed the extent to which the United Statesbreached its own restrictions on the use of depleted uranium (DU) fired from A-10 aircraft in the 2003 war in Iraq. A legal review of DU ammunition in 1975 restricted the radioactive and chemically toxic weapons for use only against armoured or “hard” targets, unless no other weapons are available. The report indicates that the weapons were in fact used more indiscriminately than previously acknowledged: only 33 percent of the 1,116 targets listed were tanks or armoured vehicles. The majority of attacks were in fact aimed at “soft” targets such as cars, trucks, buildings and troop positions, bringing the number of confirmed DU-contaminated sites in Iraq from 350 to more than 1,000. DU munitions have long been suspected to cause cancer and congenital birth defects, but the link to such negative health issues has never been conclusively proven, meaning it would be difficult to apply customary international law of armed conflict without more data on the effects of DU on health and environment. These munitions have not been restricted for use by the US-led coalition against Daesh, with the US Central Command confirming use against targets in Syria in November 2015.

A father in China, Wei Wenfeng, has launched a startup dedicated to ensuring the safety of products for children. The crowdfunded company, Daddy Lab, which aims to uncover the hidden dangers in products that would otherwise seem harmless, was set up by Wei after he discovered that many of the stationery items his daughter was using contained toxic chemicals. China has seen no shortage of scandals relating to everyday consumer products contaminated with harmful substances: in 2015, authorities in Jiangsu province found that 97 percent of pens tested contained excessive amounts of the toxic compound benzene, exposure to which can lead to cancer and anaemia. In light of the irregular management and oversight of the vast Chinese manufacturing industry, Daddy Lab takes matters into its own hands, publishing product inspection test results and fielding requests from parents all over the country about substances that might be harmful to their children.

Women’s rights groups in Armenia have criticised a new law aimed at reducing the high rate of sex-selective abortions for putting lives at risk and limiting women’s reproductive choices. The law requires women seeking abortion to attend a counselling session with a doctor and introduces a three-day waiting period before the procedure, during which the doctor will pass on information about the dangers of abortion. Local activists warn that the law could limit safe access to reproductive care and push women into riskier forms of abortion. Armenia has the third highest rate of abortion of female foetuses in the world, with approximately 115 boys born for every 100 girls in 2015, leading the United Nations Population fund to warn the ex-Soviet country of an impending demographic crisis. Critics of the new law say that its focus on abortion procedure is misplaced and dangerous, failing to address the poverty and patriarchal values which lie at the root of the problematic gender imbalance.