The week in children's rights - 1579

In this issue:

LATEST NEWS AND REPORTS

Civil and political rights

Armenia’s prime minister has resigned following a wave of anti-government protests in which university and secondary school students took part. The protests began in mid-April with the election of Serzh Sargsyan as the new prime minister, who critics accuse of corruption and authoritarian rule. Sargsyan had already served two consecutive five-year terms as president, but was then made prime minister, a position that is not constrained by term limits. The country’s acting minister of education and science, Levon Mkrtchyan, had warned protest organisers “to refrain from attempts to demolish the educational process and from incorporating juveniles in political developments,” arguing that taking part in protests could “endanger your safety and cause anxiety for your parents and teachers.” The defence minister made similar calls, describing children’s involvement in protests as a “red line”. Students nonetheless staged school walkouts in solidarity with the protesters. One journalist said: "This is an indication of how much people in Armenia have realised that they had the power to affect change in a system that was widely regarded as corrupt".

Nicaragua is seeing the biggest anti-government protests in over a decade in which at least 28 people have been killed, including a 17-year-old student. Protests began last week sparked by now-abandoned pension reforms, but have now grown to address economic problems, political stagnation, and the authoritarian style of government of President Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, who is both vice-president and First Lady. Street protests are extremely rare in Nicaragua, where the army maintains a tight grip on public order. However students, workers, pensioners and other citizens have come out in their tens of thousands. Last week Murillo described protesters as “miniscule”, “mediocre” and she wished “divine punishment” upon them. One protester said: "The protests are no longer just about the INSS (social security office), it is against a government that denies us freedom of expression, freedom of the press and to demonstrate peacefully”. At least 28 people have been killed in the protests, according to the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights, including a journalist who was shot in the head while covering the unrest.  

Reproduction and registration

Three same-sex couples in Italy have been able to legally register their children to both parents in the northern city of Turin, in a first for the country. A mother of one of the children gave birth after undergoing artificial insemination in Denmark, and was initially told by staff at the public records office that she would have to declare that she had had the baby with a man in order to register her son, as "no form exists" to recognise the child's birth through the procedure. The baby boy was one of four children who were officially registered to same-sex parents recently, with Turin city mayor Chiara Appendino signing the birth certificates. The other families included two men who are fathers to twin boys, and another lesbian couple. Appendino said the recognition was "a strong gesture in a legal vacuum". Although the mayor said that it was not yet possible to make a change at a legislative level, she hoped the recognition of these four children was a first step towards such a change. Italian laws over artificial insemination are strict, with procedures such as surrogacy, sperm or egg donation, and egg freezing all banned in the country.

Malta’s Commissioner for Children, Pauline Miceli, has spoken in favour of a bill proposing to legalise in vitro fertilisation. The proposed law will also allow sperm and egg donations, as well as non-commercial surrogacy. As things currently stand, surrogacy is illegal, and doctors involved in IVF or embryo transfer can be subjected to a fine ranging from €5,000 to €15,000 and a maximum three-year prison sentence. Commenting on the children’s rights implications of the bill, Miceli explained: “Both in terms of the child’s right to know their biological identity and their right to be recognised unconditionally as part of the family unit which acted for the child to be conceived, born and raised, the bill puts children conceived through medically assisted reproductive techniques on par with all other children, including adopted children.” The proposed law will keep punishments in place for surrogacy involving payment and has been criticised by opponents as poorly thought out.

Children born to Jordanian mothers and fathers from other countries are still struggling to get basic rights and services in Jordan, Human Rights Watch reports. A child born to a Jordanian mother and a non-Jordanian father is not considered a citizen in the eyes of the Jordanian State. National law allows only fathers to pass citizenship to their children and does not allow Jordanian women to confer even automatic long-term residency on their children. Despite government promises to grant non-citizen children of Jordanian women economic and social rights, they continue to face legal restrictions that trap many of them at the margins of society. The organisation’s research details the ways Jordanian authorities restrict the rights of affected children to work, own property, travel from and return to Jordan, and access government health care and other services. A 2014 government decision purporting to ease restrictions has fallen far short of expectations, the organisation notes, leading to severely diminished prospects for the future of many children. Current estimates suggest that there may be as many as 360,000 children deprived of citizenship due to this "sexist" rule, and lawmakers have resisted previous attempts to close the loophole.
 

Education

The Flemish community of Belgium denies access to mainstream education to disabled children and fails to provide the necessary assistance to ensure such inclusion, according to a recent decision from the European Committee of Social Rights. The body, which monitors States’ implementation of citizens’ social and economic rights, examined a complaint from the Mental Disability Advocacy Center (MDAC), now called Validity, which alleged that 54,000 children with disabilities in Belgium’s Flemish community were segregated into "special schools", while just over 8,000 students with disabilities were in mainstream education. The organisation claimed the government had not taken the necessary measures to provide children with disabilities with education and noted that resources are being disproportionately directed to segregated education rather than for children with disabilities in mainstream schools. In addition, the complaint cited a 2008 study which found that parents of children with disabilities paid an average of €10,296 to support their child’s education. The Committee agreed that Belgium had violated articles from the European Social Charter relating to allowing individuals with disability access to mainstream education and access to free primary and secondary education.

Recent attacks on education in Afghanistan have seen two schools badly damaged, though no children have been reported as injured or killed. In separate assaults, a girls’ high school near the capital, Kabul, was burned on 11 April, while masked attackers struck a school in Nangarhar Province days later, setting archives and labs ablaze. The girls’ high school was attacked by gunmen who beat up the night watchmen and locked them in a room before setting the building on fire, though the Ministry of Education took some time to publicly disclose details of the attack. The destruction of the girls’ school means its 981 female students may miss out on school for some time. The attack in Nangarhar was the third time a school in the district had been targeted in the past month. It is not known who has been carrying out the attacks, as in recent years mainstream Taliban forces have mostly refrained from attacking schools due to a public backlash.

Some parents in the United Kingdom are reportedly removing their children from religious education classes based on their own prejudices. Parents who withdraw their children from lessons teaching about specific religions were singled out by the country’s National Education Union as hampering schools’ efforts to “prepare a child for life in modern Britain”. Proposing a motion during the union’s annual conference to ask the government to end selective withdrawals, one member noted that religious education has developed into a subject that allows for critical thinking and exploration of other religious beliefs and non-beliefs. The member who brought the motion, Richard Griffiths, argued that the right in the rare cases where parents’ religious beliefs provided genuine grounds for withdrawal was “very different to the cases of parents with certain prejudices including Islamophobia and antisemitism who wish to remove their children from certain lessons or visits to places of worship”.
 

Digital rights

A new study has found that thousands of the most popular free children’s apps in the Google Play store are illegally tracking their young userswithout parental consent. The study, carried out at the University of California's International Computer Science Institute, analysed 5,855 of the most downloaded children's apps. It concluded that most of them "are potentially in violation" of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act 1998 (COPPA), the US federal law making it illegal to collect personally identifiable data on children under the age of 13. Almost half of the apps analysed did not follow standard security measures for sending sensitive data online, potentially in violation of the data security measures required by COPPA. Some of the apps were "transmitting location data, where you go, potentially where you live," said study co-author Serge Egelman, director of privacy research at the International Computer Science Institute, adding: "There's no way for the average consumer to tell an app can do this”.

A group of 23 child advocacy, consumer and privacy groups have filed a complaint with the United States’ Federal Trade Commission claiming that Google is violating child protection laws by collecting personal data and advertising to children under 13. The group claims Google collects young children’s personal information, including location, device identifiers and phone numbers, and tracks them across different websites and services without gaining parental consent. The group claims that YouTube, owned by Google, is the most popular online platform for children in the US, used by about 80 percent of children aged six to 12 years old. Katie McInnis, policy counsel for the Consumers Union, noted: “YouTube knows children are watching content on their site, and has created content channels specifically aimed at them, but does not appear to obtain the required parental consent before collecting information about them”.

UPCOMING EVENTS

LEAK OF THE WEEK