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Gilbert Onyango is a lawyer and Deputy Director of The CRADLE-The Children's Foundation, based in Nairobi, Kenya. His organisation mainly offers legal advice and representation to children, but also undertakes lobbying and advocacy on child rights issues and monitoring of human rights standards. The CRADLE recently launched a national campaign to establish a complaints procedure under the CRC and he recently presented the work at an NGO side event at the Human Rights Council session in Geneva. He is also a member of the NGO Advisory Council for Follow up to the UN Study on Violence Against Children, representing East and Southern Africa. He is 35 years old, married, and soon to be a father for the first time. --------------------------- I became a lawyer because I have always been driven by the desire to serve. I know everyone says being a lawyer is about making money, but it has never been my driving force. I have never charged anybody for my services, I don't know what it means. I don't know whether it equates to dying a poor man, but I want to believe that the practice of law can be different and human. The issue in child rights which I feel deserves more attention is sexual violence. Obviously I am biased because this is the area my organisation focuses on, but I think more needs to be done. This is one problem which is very difficult for a child to deal with, and a child in Africa... it's twice as hard because of the cultural implications attached to the issue of sex within the community. In most places it's considered a taboo, now when you start talking about sexual exploitation and sexual violence, that's not easy. The greatest achievement in my career was when I got a young girl who had been charged with murder acquitted. She was going to spend the rest of her life in prison and it was against all odds. I had never done this before. By using international human rights and child rights standards, (the African Charter, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Kenyan Children Act), I got an acquittal. This girl was destined to spend the rest of her life in prison. At the end, she came to me and said thank you, and she cried... that was something! The best thing about the Convention on the Rights of the Child is that it comes from the international level but we can use it to give it life at national level. It’s not about the paper in Geneva or New York or Addis, it can become a document in the court corridors and in everyone’s house. The worst thing about the Convention is that very few judges in Kenya have an appreciation for international human rights instruments. And child rights are not given the attention you or I would love to see. When I joined the child rights sector in 2001, straight out of law school, the first question I was asked from the prestigious law firm I was working at was: 'are you unable to represent adults?' I laughed it off. People, and particularly men, still look down on children's rights, that needs to change. When I went to work at the CRADLE, I was the first male lawyer representing children and there was this thing that a man cannot do this job, that this is a job for women, it was an unchartered territory. It can be cool to be a male lawyer dealing with children’s issues! We are trying to sell pro bono services as something cool, and not just something for women - but it’s not easy. The problem with lawyers is that they are not trained to deal with the human being. But think about it, it’s bad enough for an adult to go to a court, so you can imagine how bad it is for a child. Often children just need reassurance. We work with children on an individual level to help them feel like they have received some justice, everyone wants justice. Victims are not going to say ‘I want to talk to the minister to get the law changed’, they want the perpetrator to pay. We then use the information that comes from those children to support our argument at the policy level to try to effect change on a wider scale and for a number of children. We have done this quite a bit, for instance in drafting the Sexual Offences Act, or the Anti trafficking Bill in Kenya. Now, I want to go to the international court. The recent violence in Kenya was terrible. People were being targeted everywhere, we were forced to cut down our operations, closed shop and asked staff to stay at home until the crisis calmed down. That was hard because a lot of things were happening, particularly sexual violence. Reported cases of sexual violence have risen dramatically, but perpetrators are getting away with it because the police’s priorities are elsewhere. Women are reporting cases to the police and hospitals, but nothing happens beyond treatment. It’s all due to a combination of fear, panic, displacement, lack of food, people are finding themselves in unfamiliar territory. The truth needs to come out if this is ever to be sorted out. Truth and justice is essential so that we can start the national healing process. As to how it will all play out, no one knows. There is enough to go around for everyone. We all need to accommodate each other for the country to move forward. We need to put our bigotry and selfishness behind. The child rights advocate I most admire is my mentor Millie Odhiambo. She is a brave woman, very brave. Brave almost bordering on dangerous. She has been doing things even men would fear doing. When we were lobbying for the Sexual Offences Act, she led the crowds in a march to the Parliament offices. Security forces were there to try to stop civil society, but she went, blocked the street, lied down on the floor – all the while with an AK47 pointing at her. The best thing about my job is being able to affect the lives of millions of children in Kenya and billions across the world in my own small way. I am sure sitting in that room at the Human Rights Council will have its little impact. The worst thing about my job is the slow pace at which things move and the fact that sometimes it takes too long for people to appreciate the simplest thing. And the fact that people’s personal interest and national interest sometimes comes over and above something that is otherwise very important. If I were not answering these questions I would be working on my thesis for my masters. My perfect job in child rights would be a job that would allow me to do what I am doing at this level but with more clout. So that then a lot more people can listen to me, not as somebody trying to convince them, but somebody telling them what to do. If I were not working in child rights… Honestly I don't see anything else I would want to do. I will do everything I can to ensure I remain in this sector. I love my job. I really love what I do, it's out of this world! I would like to mentor younger people, I was mentored and it is important to help younger people. I would like to help them do what I am doing and if possible, do it even better. We often get too busy, doing this or that, but we must take time to give them power to run the show. If you could give child rights advocates one piece of advice... lets do it for the love of the child. If I had to sum up children’s rights in one word, it should be non-contentious.
We provide training for lawyers. So far we trained 200 lawyers on child rights litigation and using child rights instruments, and on child psychology. With all those three levels of training, a lawyer should be able to represent a child.