The Right to Rights

Abstract

WHEN Canada signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990, all levels of government undertook to abide by and implement a set of entitlements viewed as too radical by our American neighbors. A decade after it was drafted, only the United States and Somalia have refused to ratify the Convention. Critics around the world have quite rightly pointed out that the Convention subverts absolute parental and institutional authority over children. Not only does the Convention forbid practices such as sending children into indentured work in brick factories and battlefields, but it could dramatically alter the everyday experiences of the children of relative affluence. Whether this constitutes progressive public policy or a concerted assault on family autonomy is still a matter of debate, at least in some circles. The Convention's Canadian opponents lost their fight to persuade their political leaders that the Convention was hostile to the rights of parents. Critics borrowed many of the arguments of their American counterparts who warned that the Convention marked another skid down the slippery slope toward the twin terrors of child anarchy and world government. For example, America's Future claimed in 1995 that the Children's Rights Treaty was a recipe for disaster: Back talk and blasphemy are therefore protected, as are propaganda and pornography, cults and covens, idleness and iniquity - any interest or activity indulged in by an undisciplined child.1 Most children's rights activists agreed that the Convention overturned traditional constructions of the rights of children. While the idea that children were the exclusive property of parents had diminished over time, activists argued that it was inadequate to replace child ownership with a somewhat sentimental paternalism characterized by legislation aimed at protecting children. At its well-intentioned core, this system fosters the presumption that children are entitled to the protection of adults, who have rights, because the children themselves have none. In effect, the Convention overturns the balance of rights. Under the Convention, parents and the state do not have fundamental rights in relation to children; it is children who have fundamental rights and adults who bear the responsibility to provide for these rights. Children's rights include the right to receive basic economic and social necessities, such as health care (article 24) and education (article 28). Children have the right to be protected from harm, including the harm arising from abuse or neglect (article 19), economic exploitation (article 32), and sexual exploitation (article 34). Children with disabilities are entitled to special care (article 23), and minority and indigenous children have the right to enjoy their own culture, practice their own religion, and use their own language (article 30). Perhaps the most contentious section of the Convention codifies children's rights to participation, including the right to freedom of expression and information (article 13), the right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly (article 15), and the right to have their opinions heard in matters affecting them (article 12). The Convention obliges signatory states not only to recognize these fundamental rights of children but also to implement them and to report on their progress toward implementation. As successive UN reports have pointed out, signatories to the Convention have not always given children the first call on public resources that the Convention envisioned. Everything from punitive debt repayment schemes to international currency speculation erodes the capacity of poor nations to provide children with basic health care and education. Some nations persist in what outsiders see as a perverse determination to spend their resources on conflict - again aiding the developed countries of the world, which profit from the arms trade. A pessimist could find abundant evidence to bury the fond hopes of internationalists who seek progress through the consensus-building process that leads to international conventions. …