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World Law Now

Children Participating in Lawmaking

By David Gallup

(Part II of two)

In the previous edition of World Citizen News, we examined the monitoring, intervention, adjudication and enforcement processes to deal with violations of children's rights. Children's education and participation in lawmaking complement these other facets of rights protection.

NGOs and Children's Rights Education

Acting as a surrogate voice for children, a number of nongovernmental organizations throughout the world provide training and educational programs on children's rights. One such organization is the National Institute for Citizen Education in the Law (NICEL), which promotes understanding of lawmaking. Since 1985, NICEL has established human rights and democracy education programs in more than 75 countries.

Through NICEL text books, such as "Teens, Crime and the Community" as well as its "street law" projects, children are learning about their rights and responsibilities; by means of this service learning component, children define a community problem and then devise a project to address it.

"We want children to be effective citizens-both national citizens and world citizens," says Meg Satterthwaite, NICEL's international program coordinator.

"How do you create an advocacy mind-set?" asks her colleague, Jeff Chinn. "People have been told what to do for so long that they don't know how to claim their rights. Education can inspire people to take action, even in places where there has been no rule of law."

Another nongovernmental organization focusing on nonviolent action through the rule of law, Little Friends for Peace (LFP), educates children about conflict-management strategies aimed at preventing violence and other rights violations. "We believe that acts of violence from playground put-downs, to family fights, to street crime, to international conflicts build on each other, from the ground up, like a house constructed off-balance," LFP explains. "The way to break down the violence is to learn peace at an early age . . . and to practice it at every age." Beyond NGOs, Children Participate in Lawmaking

Violations of children's rights continue with impunity partly because children have not had an adequate voice in the process of lawmaking itself. Besides helping children understand their rights and responsibilities, adults must empower them to move beyond the educational framework to actual involvement in development of law-the culminating stage in addressing the sources of rights violations. By involving children in lawmaking, affirming that they have a voice in how they are treated, how they treat others, and how they choose to lead their lives, we can lessen the alienation from the governing system that is often catalyst for human rights abuses.

"Authentic participation of children-it is so important in the process of democracy," says Professor Roger Hart, director of the Children's Environments Research Group. "Children aren't taught to be critical of the political process. But children can be the protagonists of their own rights."

In his book "Children's Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship," Hart provides examples of children taking part in lawmaking.

When Brazil was simultaneously considering the ratifications of its national constitution as well as the international Convention on the Rights of the Child, up to 300 "street and working children" camped out in front of the Brazilian parliament buildings to demand greater respect for their rights. This action led members of parliament to invite street children from all over Brazil to democratically elect street children to represent them. Once the children had created a countrywide alliance, they returned to the parliament to speak out on their own behalf. The children actually "took over" the parliament buildings for an entire day during which they critiqued the Children's Rights Convention and testified to the many violations they suffer.

This event has developed into annual local, regional and national conferences of street and working children who voice their opinions to the parliament and influence legislation on children's issues.

Children in Ecuador, India, Kenya and the Philippines have used similar participatory processes to incorporate their views into legislation and to improve governmental services for children.

Not only does this involvement enhance the prospect that governments and businesses will respect children's rights, but it also fosters literacy for children who have little or no access to formal schooling.

Young people also play an active role in the civic affairs of some European countries. In France, Germany, Italy and Spain, children democratically elect their own councils that take up local governmental issues pertaining to children's rights. In France alone, there are over 1500 such children's councils.

The next logical progression, due to the growing availability of computers and Internet resources, will be to expand these local children's councils to the global level.

As the inheritors of the organizational and human rights frameworks of today's adults, children have a vested interest in helping to determine how we will govern our planet into the next century. Indeed, persons of all ages are eligible to participate in the World SyntegrityTM Project, which seeks to develop answers to the question of how world citizens are to democratically govern our world. Children, who comprise one-third of humanity, are thus able to add their unique and crucial perspectives to the evolution of law at the world level.

Children's Rights as Human Rights

The child is a tabula rasa. And children are closer to the concept of absolute humanness than are most adults; they do not view the world through the eyes of cynicism, distrust, hate, or indifference. Children do not discriminate.

As they become adults, the values which their parents and the community have inculcated in them determine how they will treat others and whether they will respect themselves and the earth. Children learn from examples that adults set: they learn about respecting or violating family and community rules and local laws. Children learn from adults to build exclusionary borders around themselves, around their families, and around their countries.

Because discrimination is knitted into our sociopolitical organization, into national laws that separate the human family, children find it hard to break through the structure that prefers they be "seen and not heard."

How do they begin to voice the violations that they are suffering? How do they begin to participate in the lawmaking process?

Many children already promote children's rights through their involvement in groups like Free the Children, a youth organization "dedicated to the elimination of child labor and the exploitation of children and to the implementation of the Rights of the Child." However, because so many of the world's children live in conditions of poverty, malnutrition and war, they must spend their time trying to fulfill their basic needs and have no opportunity to participate in law development. Children's rights fall by the wayside when human rights are not respected.

The successful promotion and enforcement of children's rights therefore depends upon promoting and enforcing human rights globally, for all persons, of any age. Perhaps children's rights need a stronger advocate at the world level because children have historically been disenfranchised from the lawmaking process. In the end, we need to empower children and to help adults better understand children's needs, goals, and participatory capacities.

David Gallup is the General Counsel of the World Service Authority.


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