Recruiting child soldiers under the age of 18 is a crime under international law. Recruiting children under the age of 15 is a war crime. The International Criminal Court‘s first trial will be that of DRC warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, charged with recruiting child soldiers as young as 10. The term ‘child soldier’ refers to […]
Australia has finally ratified the two optional protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The protocols, which extend the original treaty with additional provisions of equal standing, relate to the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography (OP-CRC-SC) and to the involvement of children in armed conflict (OP-CRC-AC). The 1989 […]
Rioting erupted on the streets of Tonga on 16 November. Police and soldiers were given emergency powers while Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand sent in troops. Shortly thereafter reports emerged of maltreatment of prisoners in custody. Some of those said to have been abused were peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators with no involvement in the unrest. Tongan soldiers […]
I heard news today of an old friend. She’s married with two kids and living in an outer suburb of Melbourne in one of those enormous houses widely derided as a ‘McMansion.’ Despite significant housing problems in Australia, these ‘suburban castles’ with four or more bedrooms account for 60% of new housing downunder; 48% of […]
The right to water, the right to health, the right to life, the right to education. They all tie in to something as simple and unmentionable as sanitation. Yes, toilets. The most basic will do, plus some way to wash your hands. One kind that is inadequate is the ‘flying toilet’ found in unsewered shantytowns. […]
School fees as low as 875 shillings ($US12) a year is enough to prevent millions of African children getting even a basic education. Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki made the first 8 years of school free in 2003 — including free textbooks — and the response has been tremendous. In that time, school enrolments have risen […]
It’s hard to believe something so fundamental as water was not mentioned in any of the major human rights treaties until 1989. I guess earlier drafters took water for granted in a way that is now unthinkable. In addition to the explicit provision in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the right to […]
The Back Pack Health Worker Team (BPHWT), a Thai NGO established by Burmese expats in 1998, provides primary health care and health education to rural and conflict-ridden areas of Burma. They have 70 teams of 2-5 health workers trying to meet the health needs of some 140,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the east of […]
There are the moral and legal arguments in favour of human rights, which ought to be enough, but, let’s face it, sometimes it helps to come up with self-interested reasons for abusers to cease and desist and for governments to protect and promote. And in this geo-political clime, ‘national security’ is leverage par excellence. Here’s […]
Greetings to all breastfeeding women! It’s World Breastfeeding Week and what better time to take a rights-based approach to breastfeeding? We all have a right to health. More fully expressed, it is a right to the "highest attainable standard of physical and mental health." Well, the highest available standard of health, both in infancy and […]
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