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Samenvatting Artikelen en college aantekeningen week 2
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Children’s rights week 2Implementeren en monitoren van kinderrechten
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF THE UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON THE
RIGHTS OF THE CHILD: ACHIEVEMENTS AND CHALLENGES 25
while there is definitely a broad appreciation for the Convention, there is criticism as well and
opinions differ on its exact relevance and impact. As a contribution to a critical assessment of
the record of the twenty-five year old Convention on the Rights of the Child, this article
reviews a selected number of its major achievements and challenges.
The CRC regime’s achievements are addressed much more elaborately than the challenges
are. At least two different reasons justify this. Firstly, the achievements provide more insight
into the contributions of the CRC to the progressive development of international law while
the challenges, on the whole, are more of a practical nature. Secondly, while the achievements
presented are all strong assets of the Convention, none of them show unequivocally positive
track records only and require critical scrutiny. The challenges do not show this dual nature.
One of the most tangible achievements stimulated by the Convention is law reform. All over
the world states have started to hold their national legal systems against the light in order to
increase conformity with the letter and/or spirit of the Convention.
After having discussed the above-mentioned four selected main overall positive features of
the CRC’s performance record, the remainder of this article then presents, much more briefly,
an analysis of four selected major challenges that stand in the way of the fuller realization of
the Convention. These comprise the following: the complex nature of tackling the persistent
nature of the root causes of many child rights violations; difficulties in permeating into the
private – including domestic – sphere where a considerable number of child rights violations
occur but which are still under-regulated in international human rights law; and issues
concerning the availability of data and resources. At the end of the article brief concluding
remarks are presented.
A critical analysis of selected achievements
1. A comprehensive standard
A first achievement to appreciate is that the CRC is a truly comprehensive standard of
children’s rights, both in its substantive scope and in its geographical application. the
Convention on the Rights of the Child consists of no less than 54 articles. These can be
divided into 41 substantive articles which deal with a broad range of rather diverse specific
children’s rights. They cover for example the child rights to: life; a name and nationality;
freedom of expression; freedom of thought, conscience and religion; health; social security;
an adequate standard of living; education; enjoy his or her own culture, profess and practise
his or her own religion and/or use his or her own language; or rest and leisure.
This substantive section is followed by 13 procedural articles which address matters such as
implementation and monitoring procedures and technicalities concerning signature,
ratification of or accession to the Convention, its entry force, amendments, reservations, and
denunciation.
, As alluded to earlier on in this contribution, over time three additional Optional Protocols
came about. The first two of these Optional Protocols added substance to the original CRC
text on matters concerning the involvement of children in armed conflict, and the sale of
children, child prostitution and child pornography. The third Optional Protocol introduced
complaints and inquiry procedures.
However, as was already alluded to in the introduction to this article, the achievement of this
level of comprehensiveness is certainly not perfect. There are still certain aspects or realms of
children’s and/or young people’s lives that the CRC neglects or underemphasizes. One of the
most glaring examples is that of gender, which is hardly covered explicitly.
One could perhaps argue that the very fact that many of the States Parties to the CRC have
also ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against
Women, combined with the fact that the CRC systematically contains sex-specific language
(‘his or her’), requires states to pay attention to the gender dimensions of both the child rights
and violations of the child rights involved.
Another substantive gap in the CRC relates to matters concerning neutral or positive notions
of young persons’ sexuality, which are not covered at all.
Other gaps in the content of the CRC that have been pointed out in the academic literature
include: the position of ‘social orphans’, defined as children living outside of family care.
Another manifestation of the comprehensiveness of the CRC is that, according to its Article 2,
its scope of application extends to ‘each child’ within the jurisdiction of a State Party. This
covers every possible child, regardless of whether, for example, the child holds a legal
residence title for the state in which it is present, whether it is an indigenous or minority child,
a girl or a boy, a child with disabilities or a fully abled child, or a child living in an urban or
rural area. This is an important feature for addressing discrimination, marginalization and
exclusion.
2. The CRC’s ratification record
The Convention’s geographical scope of application is comprehensive as well. At the time of
its conclusion it set a record in the UN for a treaty of its kind, in terms of both the speed and
extent of its ratification by states. It entered into force less than a year after its adoption, in
September 1990, and it had achieved nearly universal ratification by the year 1997. In July
2014 the CRC had 195 States Parties.
It is also interesting that, on the whole, developing countries moved more quickly in ratifying
the Convention than developed countries did. According to Price Cohen and others: ‘[o]nly
one of the first twenty states to become parties to the Convention (Sweden) was a developed
country’.
In 1996 William Schabas noted that, of the more than 175 States Parties at the time, no less
than 47 states (i.e., slightly more than a quarter) had registered a reservation or an
interpretative declaration, ‘intended to limit the scope of their obligations’. In any case it is
very interesting to note that over the years a significant number of States Parties have decided
to drop one or more of the reservations that they had registered upon signature and/or
ratification of the CRC. These included at least six states with a generic reservation and 23
states with specific ones.
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