16 - 22 May 2002
Issue No.586
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 16 - 22 May 2002 Issue No.586 |
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Politik reigned
Children's interests were compromised in deference to real politik, writes Negar Azimi
It was to be a gathering in which children came first on the collective agenda. For 72 hours, heads of state, members of the NGO community and civil society at large would gather to pledge their commitments to the fate of the child at last week's historic United Nations Special Session on Children.
In the end, nevertheless, politik reigned supreme as the unprecedented event fell devastatingly short of its potential, backtracking in several crucial realms and culminating with the production of a weak, watered down outcome document, "A World Fit for Children." The contentious document is meant to delineate resolutions aimed at improving the lives of children over the course of the next 15 years.
Certainly the most polemical, if not interesting, moments of the session were borne of controversies surrounding reproductive health. Nuance and linguistic games proved ubiquitous as the Bush administration, led by Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson joined by the Vatican and a host of Middle Eastern nations, argued that the standard designation "reproductive health services" would connote, and by extension, endorse abortion as a mode of family planning.
When push came to shove, Thompson and his entourage prevailed as "reproductive health services" were replaced with "reproductive health." Furthermore, all references to abortion had been expunged, though they were in fact only to apply in those countries in which it is legal. Language surrounding access to reproductive health education had also been kept to a bare minimum, while attempts were made to rollback existing agreements on providing adolescents with sexual and reproductive health education and services.
The session's resolutions in the realm of reproductive health are unequivocally a step backwards. Advocates of abstinence have ignored the fact that as a family planning method, it has not proven effective the world over. Those who think that teaching children about sex serves to encourage it should be advised to examine the extensive literature surrounding the benefits of reproductive health education.
And what of the millions of young women who are forced into marriage, and more often, sex -- driven by economic, social, and cultural imperatives and left with little room to negotiate the right to resist? In some countries, half of the teenage population is married; failing to provide sexual health education to these young women will be disastrous, particularly in an era in which rampant AIDS has changed the rules of the game. In Zimbabwe, as many as 30 per cent of teenage girls have tested HIV-positive, while globally, 2000 children under the age of 15 contract HIV every day. Half of all new HIV infections are among youth.
Needless to say, the prospect of promoting abstinence in this context, too often a virtual non-option, is both naive and inappropriate.
What of the gains registered over the last decade, the millions afforded access to expanded contraception and sexual health education at large, or the changes in domestic legislation facilitating such change? Ironically enough, Washington has served as a leader in consolidating such gains in the past, but now, with a handful of traditionally conservative nations, is proving an obstacle to their realisation.
Members of NGOs advocating sexual health education spilled out of one meeting last week with pink neon signs reading "Shame." Indeed, the outcome document's overt failure to take such realities into account renders it a failure in addressing the reproductive health needs of today's children.
Meanwhile, controversy surrounding the status of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and an accompanying rights-based approach to children ended in the US delegation managing to minimise references to the landmark document. The CRC reflects a full spectrum of children's rights, requiring governments to provide children with education and health care, and to protect children from discrimination, and sexual and economic exploitation.
The CRC, in turn, clearly establishes that children have a right to health, including the right to access comprehensive reproductive and sexual health services, and education. Such principles have been affirmed and reaffirmed at countless UN conferences, including the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo (ICDP) and the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995.
Efforts of several countries and children's advocacy groups were naturally geared toward employing the document as the legal standard in the realm of children's rights. In the end, however, the document was given no special status. In fact, all references to the CRC were avoided at all costs; it seems that hard- fought gains registered for women and children at Beijing and Cairo had been lost, while the historic Convention has been effectively sidelined.
Indeed, the United States and Somalia share the unfortunate distinction of being the only two countries in the world that have not ratified 1989's CRC -- the most widely and rapidly ratified treaty in history. Somalia, nevertheless, signed the document last week, while ratification appears imminent. The US, in the meantime, is at odds with the Convention's condemnation of the death penalty for crimes committed before the age of 18, as well as its significantly federalist nature. In a resounding victory for the Bush administration, the outcome document excludes the US from a requirement barring the death penalty or life imprisonment for those under the age of 18. The Democratic Republic of Congo and Iran are the only two other nations known to have carried out such executions.
Some factions, such as the Christian Right, depict the Convention as a threat to parental authority, and in the end, set it in opposition to traditional family values. A provision referring to incidents of child abuse and neglect, for example, has been ingeniously interpreted as granting governments the right to remove children from their homes.
The fate of Palestinian children additionally proved a source of heightened passions as a group of 22 nations, including South Africa, Afghanistan, Cuba, and most Arab states, composed a draft General Assembly resolution announcing that children under Israeli occupation "remained deprived of many basic rights."
The proposition stirred Israeli Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit enough to use his General Assembly address as a forum to assail the Palestinian Authority for encouraging a culture of suicide. The US delegation, for its part, called the proposed resolution absurd, arguing that the UN special session was not the place for such overtly political questions.
The outcome document did, however, manage to make special mention of the impact of armed conflict on children. In the end, the UN session's outcome document has the potential to transcend mere gesture and in fact sway governments, civil society, and by extension, children at large, serving as a benchmark for progress to be made in the next decade and a means of rectifying oft-broken promises. After all, the ravages of HIV/ AIDS, child labour, trafficking of children, sexual exploitation, and the perpetuation of the problem of child soldiers remain very much a reality.
But this particular document presents little commitment to the very population it proclaims to serve. It seems that governments, too embedded in political side-stepping and national whim, have turned their backs on the world's most vulnerable citizens again, too often left at the mercy of the most powerful.
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