CRINmail 1504
In this issue:
Children's rights and the SDGs
News in brief
Upcoming events
Employment
Children's rights and the Sustainable Development Goals
Introduction
Efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), now underway, will inevitably steer children’s rights advocacy in the coming years to follow the direction of international donors. We reiterate our belief that the only viable path to sustainable development is that laid by the universal realisation of human rights. However, while rights run through the SDGs, they risk being under-developed. In today’s CRINmail we argue that if rights are to mean more than a rhetorical flourish, access to justice must be recognised as a goal that underlies and supports the realisation of all the SDGs. In addition, the new goals - which are not revolutionary or a radical reinvention of rights, but rather set targets for their realisation - must build on existing standards, such as the UN Study to End Violence against Children.
Read CRIN’s full submission to the call “Protection of the Rights of the Child and 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”.
Access to justice
Access to justice for children means that children and their advocates must be able to use and trust the legal system to protect their human rights. A fundamental right in itself, access to justice is recognised in SDGs (though buried towards the end), in goal 16.3: “Promote the rule of law at the national and international levels and ensure equal access to justice for all.”
However, access to justice is also a prerequisite for the realisation of all other human rights, and therefore to the delivery of the full range of SDGs, whether action to combat climate change under goal 13 or health rights under goal 3. States have an obligation to fulfil their human rights obligations no matter how they choose to deliver services. This means children should be able to access justice where they fall short, regardless of whether a service is delivered directly by the State, outsourced or privatised.
Here we set out some of the issues affecting children’s access to justice and why this strikes at the heart of all the goals.
Equality and non-discrimination
One of the main reasons children do not enjoy their rights on an equal footing with other human beings is the age discrimination they face in accessing justice. As a result of their lack of independence and full legal standing in societies in most countries, children are not always able to pursue remedies for violations of their human rights. They are generally prevented by law from bringing court cases by themselves and in their own names, and are instead required to have an adult legal representative. They also often need to secure the consent of their parent or guardian before proceedings can be brought in the first place. This means age discrimination is commonly exacerbated by gender discrimination, by requiring that the power to initiate legal proceedings be vested in a child’s father or grandfather - a particular problem where such a figure is responsible for the violation. Children often need and want support to engage with the legal system, but where these rules are based on arbitrary age limits rather than the capacity of a child, or fail to cater for the needs of particular groups of children, they curtail access to justice.
Investing in children
No one should be prevented from seeking access to justice because they cannot finance their case, but few children can pay for legal advice and assistance without access to legal aid. Forty-two countries worldwide lack a functioning state-funded legal aid system. This means that 220 million children have no access to free legal aid for any type of legal action. And only a handful of States provide legal aid to children automatically where a particular type of legal action is covered by the legal aid system. What is more, eligibility criteria which consider factors such as the financial situation of a parent limit the coverage of legal aid. A functioning state-funded legal aid and assistance programme that is accessible to children is fundamental to ensuring that they are able to access justice for any violation of their rights.
Accountability and monitoring
At the core of access to justice for children is ensuring that children’s rights are enforceable. This means holding those responsible for realising children’s rights to account when they fail to meet their obligations. This aspect of access to justice can be realised through various mechanisms, including enabling children to access administrative courts and complaint mechanisms. These can be used to challenge the action or inaction of governments. Empowering national human rights institutions, including children’s ombudspersons, to monitor progress of the State in realising children’s rights and to directly address complaints from children or to bring complaints through the courts can also serve to achieve this.
Read more in CRIN’s global report on access to justice for children.
Working with what we’ve got
Human rights are central to the SDGs, both as an outcome and a means of achieving the full spectrum of goals. As such, every aspect of their implementation must be grounded in existing human rights standards, rather than attempting to draw up new ones. This includes those developed specifically to protect the rights of children, such as violence against children.
Violence against children
The UN’s Violence Study remains the best blueprint we have for ending violence against children, and sets out detailed recommendations to this end. The Study’s core refrain is that no violence against children is justifiable; all violence against children is preventable.
Goal 16.2 singles out specific forms of violence - such as abuse, exploitation, trafficking and torture - but it also explicitly calls for an end to “all forms of violence” against children. This means targeting all forms of violence in all settings - as set out in the Study. This includes addressing the death penalty and other violent criminal sentences; corporal punishment at school or in the home; and economic and sexual exploitation.
The Study’s process to collect data and produce recommendations involved full consultation with States, UN agencies, civil society, experts around the world. If the SDGs are to target violence against children effectively, the expertise gathered and represented in the Study should form the basis of efforts to realise the relevant goals. In particular, the recommendations of the UN’s Violence Study should be at the core of the 2030 agenda on violence against children.
This same approach of working with existing human rights standards - painstakingly negotiated over decades - rather than reinventing the wheel, must apply to all areas of the SDGs. We know what we need to do, we just need to take action to do it.
Read more on children’s rights and the SDGs.
NEWS IN BRIEF
Environment and health
Education and civil rights
Armed conflict
Slavery
Detention
Refugees - Calais crisis
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UPCOMING EVENTS
Violence: 19 Days of Activism For the Prevention of Violence Against Children and Youth
Organisation: Women's World Summit Foundation
Dates: 1-19 November 2016
Location: Global
Child-friendly policies: Child in the City Conference
Organisation: Child in the City Foundation
Dates: 7-9 November
Location: Ghent, Belgium
Child care: Children's Rights in Alternative Care
Organisation: SOS Children’s Villages
Dates: 8-9 November 2016
Location: Paris, France
Child protection: Webinar on using genograms & ecograms in planning & evaluating family interventions
Organisation: RISE
Date: 11 November 2016
Location: Global
Business: 2016 UN forum on business and human rights
Organisation: Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
Dates: 14-16 November 2016
Location: Geneva, Switzerland
Right to work: Course on eliminating child labour and promoting decent work in agriculture
Organisation: International Training Centre of the ILO (ITCILO)
Dates: 14-18 November 2016
Location: Turin, Italy
Child labour: Course on developing skills and livelihood training programmes for older children
Organisation: ITCILO
Dates: 21-25 November 2016
Location: Turin, Italy
Child rights: Applications for LL.M in International Children’s Rights
Organisation: Leiden University
Application deadline: 1 April 2017 (non-EU) / 15 June 2017 (EU students)
Dates: September 2017 - Summer 2018
Location: Leiden, The Netherlands
Best interests: International Conference on Shared Parenting
Organisations: National Parents Organization & the International Council on Shared Parenting
Dates: 29-31 May 2017
Location: Boston, United States
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EMPLOYMENT
Orchid Project: Chief Operating Officer
Application deadline: Rolling
Location: London, United Kingdom
Save the Children Sweden: Regional advisor
Application deadline: 4 November 2016
Location: Asia (TBD)
Center for Reproductive Rights: Global Advocacy Adviser
Application deadline: 19 November 2016
Location: Geneva, Switzerland
UNICEF: Call for expressions of interest in evaluating UNICEF’s strategies and programme performance with regard to strengthening child protection systems
Application deadline: 19 November
Plan International: Director, Global SDG Tracker Initiative
Application deadline: 28 November
Location: Woking, United Kingdom
Oak Institute: Fellowship in film/photography and human rights
Application deadline: 2 December 2016
Location: Maine, United States
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LEAK OF THE WEEK
The need to take responsibility for one's actions is something that we are all instilled with from a young age as a commendable quality, but it’s one that can dissolve, especially if the actions in question result in the deaths of well over 9,000 people.
After years of denying responsibility for the cholera outbreak in Haiti, which UN peacekeepers are thought to have brought to the country in 2010 after not being screened for the disease, it has taken a scathing report by one of the UN’s own independent experts, Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, to finally get the world body to admit liability. Well, sort of, and without explicitly saying so.
In August this year the office of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said it would address its “involvement in the initial outbreak” - a move believed to have been prompted by the advent of Alston’s draft report. In its presentation to the UN General Assembly in October, Alston calls the UN’s post-outbreak response a “disgrace” and declared that its refusal to “hold itself accountable for human rights violations … makes a mockery of its efforts to hold governments and others to account." Rather than admitting legal responsibility, the UN has to-date limited itself to acknowledging the fluffy-sounding “moral responsibility”.
Alston’s report is believed to be one of the few times UN human rights experts have turned their criticism to the UN hierarchy itself. And what the case has shown is that instead of taking the high road and leading by example as an organisation “whose reputation depends almost entirely on being seen to act with integrity,” as Alston described, the UN is taking the low road because, apparently, it’s fine to lead by example, so long as it’s not a bad example.
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