ABA adds its voice to calls for the US to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child
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The CRC was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1989 and went into force in 1990 after being ratified initially by 20 countries. According to the Campaign for U.S. Ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child based in New York City, the CRC has become the most widely ratified international treaty in history, and only the U.S. government’s inaction is keeping the convention from becoming the first-ever universally ratified human rights treaty.
The CRC is built on ambitious goals by incorporating the full range of human rights into one text to promote the rights of children worldwide. The convention also affirms the primary role of parents in providing appropriate guidance to their children, including how to exercise their rights, and describes the family as the fundamental unit of society.
The convention lays out the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of children in four main areas: survival, including basic health care and disease prevention, nutrition, safe water and environmental health; development, through access to education and cultural activities; protection from risks to their mental, physical and emotional well-being; and participation in decisions and actions that affect them and their futures.
The irony of the U.S. government’s failure to ratify the CRC is that the administration of President Ronald Reagan actively participated in negotiations that produced it, and several key provisions in the convention were initially proposed by the United States. The Clinton administration signed the CRC in 1995—an action that normally indicates an intention to send a treaty to the Senate for ratification (which requires a two-thirds majority)—but neither President Bill Clinton nor any of his successors have taken that step, although the Senate in 2003 (during President George W. Bush’s administration) did ratify two optional protocols to the treaty that specifically address the role of children in armed conflicts and the issue of trafficking in children. The Senate has not ratified a third optional protocol adopted by the U.N. in 2014 that allows children to bring complaints of serious violations of their rights to the Committee on the Rights of the Child, an independent panel of experts that oversees the CRC and monitors compliance among signatory nations.
HOW FRUSTRATING
The U.S. government’s failure to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child has been a cause of frustration among many human rights groups. “The U.S. cares about children; Americans care about children worldwide,” says Mark Engman, director of public policy and advocacy at the U.S. Fund for UNICEF in New York City. But because the United States has not ratified the CRC, he says, “we can’t partner” with signatory countries in implementing and applying it to help children around the world.
Recently, there has been a renewed effort by human rights organizations and other groups in the United States to spur movement by the administration and the Senate toward ratification. In late 2014, the Campaign for U.S. Ratification of the CRC wrote a letter, signed by the leaders of more than 100 U.S.-based organizations, urging President Barack Obama to send the treaty to the Senate for ratification. “Our nation’s failure to join almost every other nation in the world as a party to the CRC tarnishes our global reputation as a defender of children and family,” the letter stated.
At about the same time, the ABA made a separate pitch calling on the administration to submit the CRC to the Senate for consideration. The ABA and its Center on Children and the Law “have multiple policies and projects relating to enhancing access to justice for children and families, and we view ratification of the CRC as critical to this objective,” wrote then-ABA President William C. Hubbard in a letter sent to Secretary of State John Kerry on Oct. 22, 2014. Since its adoption in 1989, “the CRC has proven a powerful tool to improve laws and policies for children and families around the world,” wrote Hubbard of Columbia, South Carolina. He noted that the ABA House of Delegates adopted a recom-mendation in 1991 . The recommendation “supports in principle the ratification by the United States” of the CRC.
“The failure of the United States to join almost every other nation as a party to the CRC undermines the ability of the United States to advocate for children and families fully and credibly elsewhere in the world,” Hubbard wrote. And on the home front, he wrote, “the CRC would provide the United States with a comprehensive framework to analyze, document and report on conditions for children, including how government agencies consider the views of parents and youth. That framework would in turn help officials at all levels of government develop policies and programs that better meet the needs of children and families.”
The ABA is a longtime advocate of children’s rights in the United States and abroad. In 1978, it created the Center on Children and the Law, which now coordinates much of the association’s efforts to improve child protection laws, judicial practices and legal advocacy for the country’s most vulnerable children, including those in foster care. The center also works with members of the justice system at the state level to provide technical assistance and training.
A NEW PUSH
With Obama in the final year of his presidency, proponents of the Convention on the Rights of the Child believe the time for action may finally be at hand. “We think that it is doable,” says Meg E. Gardinier, secretary general of the ChildFund Alliance in New York City, who chairs the steering committee for the Campaign for U.S. Ratification of the CRC. “It is work, but the campaign is solidly committed to help. We are not afraid to take some heavy lifting.”
Within the U.S., ratifying the CRC “could provide a framework to improve the well-being of all children,” says professor Jonathan Todres of Georgia State University College of Law in Atlanta, an expert on children and the law. In the international realm, he says, “a common refrain heard by U.S. human rights advocates, including myself, is: ‘How can the U.S. expect other countries to do more when it won’t even participate at all?’ “
But the U.S. government’s reluctance to move toward ratification of the CRC reflects a wariness about international treaties in general, even those it supports in principle. Among the treaties the Senate still has not ratified are the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1979 and signed by the United States in 1980; the Convention on the Law of the Sea (adopted in 1982, signed in 1994); the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (adopted in 2006, signed in 2009); and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (adopted in 1998), which was signed by President Clinton shortly before he left office, then “unsigned” by President Bush in 2002.
The CRC also has its share of opponents. Michael P. Farris, a lawyer and chair of the Home School Legal Defense Association in Purcellville, Virginia, says many object not only to the CRC but also to other international treaties, because they threaten American sovereignty, defying “the principle of self-government.” Countries that are signatories to the convention have only political obligations to it, he argues, while the U.S. would have legal obligations under the Constitution’s supremacy clause, making the treaty “the supreme law of the land.” Farris’ group has called the CRC “the most dangerous attack on parental rights in the history of the United States” because home-schoolers perceive that it would threaten their choices as parents.
Intrusion into family life is also a concern of Allan C. Carlson, president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society in Rockford, Illinois, who has written that the CRC “contains measures that subvert the authority of parents over their children; strip away the authority of religious faith and tradition in favor of a politicized and radical social science; and prevent nations and peoples from sheltering their own unique cultures.”
But Todres says that much of the opposition to the CRC is based on inflammatory rhetoric that doesn’t reflect either the language of the convention or the way human rights treaties are incorporated into domestic law in the United States. “The language of the treaty and evidence from other countries’ implementation of the CRC demonstrate that the CRC can be a wonderful tool that supports children and their families,” Todres says. Unfortunately, the convention “has been used as a pawn in a much broader political and cultural battle in the U.S., to the detriment of many children in need.” getty images
“The failure of the United States to join almost every other nation as a party to the CRC undermines the ability of the United States to advocate for children and families fully and credibly elsewhere in the world.”
This article originally appeared in the March 2016 issue of the ABA Journal with this headline: “The Last Holdout: The ABA adds its voice to calls for the United States to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child.”
