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United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

Prior to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, human rights standards to all members of the human family have been expressed in legal instruments such as covenant, conventions and declaration, as did standards relating to the specific concerns of children. But it was only in 1989 that the standards concerning children were brought together in a single legal instrument approved by the international community and spelling in an unequivocal the right to which every child is entitled, regardless of where born or to whom, regardless of sex, religion, or social origin. The body of rights enumerated in the Convention are the rights of all children everywhere. The idea of everywhere is important. In too many countries, children’s lives are plagued by armed conflict, child labor, sexual exploitation, and other human rights violations. Elsewhere, for example, children living in rural areas may have fewer opportunities to obtain an education of good quality or may have less access to health services than children living in cities. The Convention states that such disparities –within societies- are also violation of human rights. In calling on governments to ensure the human rights of all children, the Convention seeks to correct these kinds of inequities. (taken from UNICEF, 2004; the full text of the Convention can also be found at either one of the following:

www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx

https://www.unicef.org/crc/

Note: South Sudan and Somali have finally ratified the CRC in 2014 and early 2015.SPEAK FREELY

By Sarah Mehta, Researcher, ACLU Human Rights Program

NOVEMBER 20, 2015 | 1:30 PM

Sign in the window of the abandoned Harris County Juvenile Detention Center in Houston, Texas (Credit: Randall Pugh/Flickr)

We find ourselves commemorating yet another anniversary for the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most comprehensive human rights treaty on children’s rights and notably the most widely ratified treaty since its introduction over 25 years ago. The treaty has been ratified by every country with one notable exception — the United States, which never even sent it to the Senate for consent and approval. 
Until this year, the United States was one of three countries — the other two being Somalia and South Sudan — that had failed to ratify the CRC. And while it was embarrassing enough to be in this limited company, this year, our fellow outliers ratified the convention.

So now we’re completely on our own.

On the one hand, the continued resistance to ratifying this critical and fairly conventional treaty is baffling. Both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations participated in the treaty negotiations and contributed provisions. The treaty incorporates much from U.S. law and practices and does not represent an assault on American sovereignty as some have warned. Much of the opposition to its ratification emanates from the right and has been based on incorrect assumptions about its implications for U.S. law and how the convention affects U.S. sovereignty and our interpretation of federalism.

While there is no good reason for the United States not to ratify the CRC, there are several reasons why we urgently need it. Ratifying the convention is not just about saving face in the international community — it will require us to confront some hard truths about the exceptionally bad way we treat children in the United States and to work to bring our laws and practices in line with human rights.

The most obvious arena in which the United States denies children their human rights —and their childhood — is the criminal justice system, which American children encounter far too early and with devastating consequences. From a young age, many children — particularly students of color and those with disabilities — are funneled out of the schoolroom and into prison for childhood behavior. Children as young as six years old have been removed from the classroom in handcuffs for throwing temper tantrums. Others have been arrested for engaging in a tug-of-war with a teacher or doodling on a desk.

This early and unnecessary police intervention puts kids on a harrowing path. Juvenile prisons are not centers of rehabilitation. As Vincent Schiraldi stated in a recent New York Times article, even in juvenile facilities, “horrific institutional conditions are common, not exceptional.” Removed from their families, children in these prisons are denied a meaningful education and adequate mental health treatment, have been held in solitary confinement, and are sometimes subject to physical and sexual abuse.

Across the country, states treat very young children just like adults in the criminal justice system — with the same punishments ahead of them. Fourteen states have no minimum age for when a child can be prosecuted and punished as an adult. In some cases, children as young as eight years old have been tried as adults for committing a crime. Children confined in adult prisons are in an even more vulnerable situation, forced to grow up too fast in a dangerous environment where they are significantly more at risk for sexual assault and suicide.

Over the past two months, I’ve spoken with dozens of prisoners who were tried and sentenced as adults when they were children and who, decades later, are still in prison. They spoke of the terror they experienced — for some, their first time away from their parents and their first time incarcerated — arriving in prison, surrounded by grown men and guards, feeling that they had to grow up and defend themselves or else die.

The individuals I’ve spoken with are facing life in prison, hoping one day to rejoin their communities. Many though have already been in prison for 30-40 years. “I wake up every day expecting to be released,” one man told me. He has been in prison for murder for 30 years, since he was 15 years old. “You need that hope or you’d be a dead man walking.”

For thousands of children, however, that hope was extinguished when they were sentenced. The United States remains the only country in the world to sentence children to life in prison without the possibility of parole, a severe punishment that is categorically prohibited under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. While in recent years the U.S. Supreme Court has limited the application of this life and death sentence to children, around 2,500 people are currently serving this sentence for crimes they were involved in years ago as children.

Right now there is growing support across party lines to end juvenile life without parole. In the past several years, 13 states have moved to eliminate this draconian sentence, and the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee recently introduced a bill that would end juvenile life without parole in the federal system and provide critical due process protections for children sentenced as adults in sentencing and resentencing. An important and overdue step, this law would only apply to children sentenced in the federal system.

For the rest of them, implementing the ideals of the Convention on the Rights of the Child might be their only hope. 

The United States signed the Convention in 2000. However, United States still has not ratified it. This means that United States endorses the Convention on the Rights of the Child and will seriously consider a legally binding ratification, but the US Congress has yet to vote on ratification. The United States, South Sudan and Somalia are the only three countries in the world that have not ratified the Convention. However, both South Sudan and Somalia are about to pass bills. Of course, there is much debate as to why the United States has been slow to ratify it. One argument is that many members of Congress have deep-seated mistrust in following the lead of United Nations in many issues and in specifically this one. The Obama administration has discussed to bring this issue up to Congress agenda.

From Washington Post:

Twenty five years ago this week, 190 member countries of United Nations passed the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a landmark agreement that stands as one of the most ratified human rights treaties in history.  The CRC, which turned 25 years old on November 20th, follows the 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and is the world’s most comprehensive framework for the protection of children’s rights. It includes the right to protection from discrimination based on their parent’s or legal guardian’s sex, race, religion, and a host of other identifiers. The convention supports protections for children from forced labor, child marriage, deprivation of a legal identity, and grants both able-bodied and disabled children the right to health care, education, and freedom of expression. It also has safeguards for parents to take care of their children, including parental leave.

Only three U.N. countries have not ratified the CRC: Somalia, South Sudan, and…the United States.

That’s right. The United States is part of an elite trio of non-ratifiers, along with Somalia, a country that is virtually in anarchy and consistently appears in the lowest ranks of countries in terms of human development, and South Sudan, the world’s newest country, which dealt with a fair share of civil conflict. Back in 2008, Obama said that it was “embarrassing to find ourselves in the company of Somalia, a lawless land.” And in all fairness to South Sudan, though the country is only three years old, it is actually in the process of ratification, having passed a bill last year to approve the CRC.

The U.S. signed the treaty under Bill Clinton in 1995, an essentially symbolic agreement with the principles set forth under the treaty. But ratification of any treaty in the United States requires a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate to pass, and a number of Republican senators, claiming concerns about U.S. sovereignty, have consistently opposed ratification..

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the treaty, the World Policy Analysis Center at UCLA’s  Fielding School of Public Health launched an online resource bank of data on the progress of all 193 U.N. member nations in the way of protecting children’s rights on issues such as child labor, parental leave, minimum wage and education in the last 25 years since the introduction of the treaty.

So are children better off than they were a quarter of a century ago? Dr. Jody Heymann, the center’s founding director said, “In recent decades, we’ve halved the mortality rate. We’ve increased the number of children attending primary school…90 percent of the countries that have made the promise [to make primary schools free and compulsory] have done so, and we have seen increases in attendance. “ Global challenges still remain in the area of child marriage, and high tuition remains a barrier access to secondary school, especially for poor children and girls around the world.

The U.S. is falling behind on a number of children’s rights indicators:

• Poverty: As of 2010, the U.S. ranked 30th out of 34 OECD countries in terms of child poverty. 21.2% of children in the United States live in poverty. The average for OECD countries is 13.3%. Only Chile, Turkey, Mexico and Israel had higher child poverty rates.

• Maternal Leave: The U.S. is the only high-income country not to grant paid maternity leave.

• Criminal Justice: The U.S. is also the one country in the world that sentences offenders under the age of 18 to life in prison without parole, which the Convention opposes.

“When the United States at first didn’t sign on to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, we were concerned that this would have implications toward showing support for children around the world,” Dr. Heymann said.  “But in fact, it didn’t get in the way of the fact that nearly other country did sign on and that there has been deep global commitment. But I think we have to worry a lot about what it means that we haven’t had focused attention on children in the United States.”

Michael P. Farris, is a constitutional lawyer and president of ParentalRights.org, an organization that has been actively campaigning against U.S. ratification of “dangerous U.N conventions that “threaten parental rights” such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child. “The chief threat posed by the CRC is the denial of American self-government in accord with our constitutional processes,” said Farris in an email interview. “Our constitutional system gives the exclusive authority for the creation of law and policy on issues about families and children to state governments. Upon ratification, this nation would be making a binding promise in international law that we would obey the legal standards created by the U.N. CRC. American children and families are better served by constitutional democracy than international law.” The group fears that ratifying the treaty would mean children could choose their own religion, that children would have a legally enforceable right to leisure, that nations would have to spend more on children’s welfare than national defense, and that a child’s “right to be heard” could trigger a governmental review of any decision a parent made that a child didn’t like.

But is the U.S.’s non-ratification of the CRC hypocritical when the U.S. lectures other countries on children’s rights? Farris says that the “United States demonstrates its commitment to human rights whenever it follows and enforces the Constitution of the United States, which is the greatest human rights instrument in all history.”

The currently all male-staff (Farris says the group has never focused on maternal leave as an issue) of ParentalRights.org and other opponents of the CRC overlook that protections for the rights of children are human rights. Protections of children with disabilities are protections for people with disabilities. Ending discrimination against children is ending discrimination against people. Ensuring paid parental leave, access to pre- and post-natal health care for women has been linked to better health outcomes for children and parents. The United States can learn from other member nations on how to reduce poverty, ensure women’s rights, improve education and educational access, and healthy living conditions, for starters. What message does the U.S. send to the rest of the world when we endorse and support young activists like Malala Yousafzai, and her platform for girls’ rights to education, when the U.S. refuses to ratify an international treaty that promotes access to education for children?

It’s high time the U.S. takes steps towards joining the rest of the world and ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child. After all, today’s healthy and well educated children are tomorrow’s healthy and well-educated adults.