Childhood in a Global Perspective. Karen Wells. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Karen Wells
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: История
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509541720
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Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

      For this purpose, the child shall in particular be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child, either directly, or through a representative or an appropriate body, in a manner consistent with the procedural rules of national law. (emphasis added)

      In 2012 the General Assembly of the UN adopted a third Optional Protocol to the UNCRC on a ‘communications procedure’. This allows individual children, groups of children or their representatives to bring complaints to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child about the violation of their rights as set out in the UNCRC and its Optional Protocols. These complaints, known in the language of the Optional Protocol as communications, can only be brought to the Committee if the complainants have already tried to get satisfaction at the national level. Although this instrument gives children a more direct route to the satisfaction of the rights set out in the UNRCR, it does not alter the fact that those rights are largely organized around education, health and welfare rather than classic political rights. Articles 13, 14, 15 and 16 (freedom of expression, religion, assembly and privacy) are the articles that are within the scope of classic political rights; however,

      the role accorded to parents and others responsible for the child under Article 5 . . . suggests, in practice, that children’s enjoyment of these . . . rights may not be as expansive as that of adult-holders of similarly expressed rights under non-child-specific international human rights instruments. That is due to the fact that the exercise of civil and political rights accorded to adults under international human rights law is not linked to adults’ evolving capacities. (Nolan 2010, cited in Langlaude 2010: 38)

      In the UNCRC and in the international declarations that foreshadowed it the child remains a special category of person who is entitled to protection from harm by virtue of their specific vulnerabilities. International law establishes who the child is: vulnerable and dependent but, at the same time, an emergent liberal citizen.

       International development

      The focus of UNICEF was gradually expanded to nutrition and medical relief, the latter bringing it into some conflict with the incipient World Health Organization. It moved into disease prevention and eradication work including mass child immunization campaigns. In 1953 the UN renewed UNICEF’s charter indefinitely. In response to neo-liberal shifts in development policy and its health impacts, UNICEF launched the ‘child survival revolution’ (Meier et al. 2018: 180) and continues to hold a prominent role in global health governance. UNICEF’s work conceptualized the health of children and disease prevention as fundamental to global development (2018: 181). UNICEF viewed itself ‘as a “catalytic agent” to advance both children’s health and a country’s socioeconomic development’ (2018: 182).

      Globalization has not only occurred at the level of increased international cooperation between states and increased financial flows. It has also involved a parallel shift below in both the movements of people and increased communication across national borders and the emergence of an incipient international civil society. The phenomenal growth in NGOs operating at the international level, or INGOs, is part of this emergent international civil society. International human rights law and particularly the UNCRC have played an important part in creating a role for INGOs and therefore stimulating their expansion.

      In the UN Charter there is provision for consultation with NGOs. It has been claimed that this provision ‘has produced much of the international practice concerning NGOs, and the “rights” given to them’ (Breen 2003: 455). NGOs participated in the drafting of the Convention through their involvement with the Ad Hoc NGO Group on the Drafting of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (now the NGO Group for the Convention on the Rights of the Child). It was through this group that ‘NGOs had a direct and indirect impact on this Convention that is without parallel in the history of drafting international instruments’ (Breen 2003: 457, citing Cantwell 1992). The Convention is also the only international human rights treaty that expressly gives NGOs a role in monitoring its implementation (Breen 2003: 457).