The Daily Background

For a Human Rights class I’m taking, we’re supposed to formulate a question(s) related to human rights each week for class. The following is my third one. You can read my first and second here and here, respectively. Question three is here. The forth can be read here. My fifth can be viewed here.

When the Convention on the Rights of the Child went into force as international law in 1990, the Bush (senior) Administration opposed it and refused to sign the treaty. Although President Clinton’s Administration signed the CRC on behalf of the United States in 1995, the US Senate still has not ratified it more than ten years later.

The current Bush White House has signalled its strong opposition to the CRC because they says it gives children too many rights (”we believe the text goes too far when it asserts entitlements based on economic, social and cultural rights”). Among the sticking points seem to be the right that the White House asserts it has to execute human beings who
were children at the time they committed a crime. This is banned under the CRC.

My question is, what else is supposedly “controversial” about the CRC? The current Administration as far as I can tell has not been explicit in what it opposes in the CRC, and under which conditions they would sign this treaty designed to protect children all over the world.

The United States and Somalia are currently the only two states which have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Somalia does not have a government recognized by the United Nations, so it
cannot technically ratify any treaties at all).

Filed under: Human Rights, Z-TDB Blog