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	Children’s rights, a founding dream by Claire Brisset Le Monde Diplomatique France   Did the UN delegates in New York realise the importance of their decision when, on 20 November 1989, they unanimously voted for the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which came into force the following year? For the first time in history, an international treaty had put children at the centre of the political sphere.   The convention declares that “in all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”   It also affirms that states must not only respect children’s fundamental rights in the areas of health, nutrition and education, but also guarantee their right to identity “including nationality, name and family relations” and protection from all forms of violence.   Last, but by no means least, it asserts children’s right to “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” and states that in all legal and administrative decisions concerning children, they may freely express their opinions, which must be “given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.”   How did the international community come up with such a binding treaty, which every signatory party is obliged to incorporate into their domestic laws? The convention is, in spite of this obligation, the most ratified international treaty in the world; only one country, the US, has yet to ratify.   The explanation is perhaps to be found in history; the convention’s long genesis has undoubtedly facilitated its acceptance. In past centuries, voices were often raised in favour of children not only receiving greater attention but also being granted proper status. In European history, for example, the cult of the Christ child in the Middle Ages was not enough to make society more congenial for children, considered as the “bad seed”, which needed to be corrected.   But in the Renaissance the importance of the individual vis-a-vis the Christian community began to be asserted. The historian Philippe Ariès describes this shift as the “birth of private life”, and it would lead in the Enlightenment to a new, less religious view of childhood, exemplified by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote in Emile, or On Education (1762): “Expect nothing from him [the child] but the plain, simple truth, without addition or ornament and without vanity. [...] he asks nothing better than to extend his domain, to acquire rights over you, which will, he knows, be respected.”   This was an idealised view of the child, certainly, but it was also new. A few decades later it made no impression on the drafters of France’s civil code, though; the only status the Code Napoléon accorded children was that of heir, and it turned their mothers into minors. The code stipulated: “Incapable of contracting are: minors, interdicted persons, married women in the cases expressed by the law” (article 1124).   In the 19th century we have to look to literature, medicine and political philosophy to find more fruitful reflections on the rights of the child; they are there in Dickens and Hugo, later in Marx and Engels, and then in Freud, all of whom made children the subject of literary, psychological and political reflection.   The true foundations of the modern vision of the rights of the child were laid in Poland in the early 20th century. The Warsaw paediatrician Janusz Korczak developed a subversive strain of thought, severely critical of the patriarchal society of his time. He ended his life in Treblinka’s gas chambers in 1942, along with the 200 Jewish orphans whom he tried to protect to the last.   Any conceptual progress in children’s rights went into reverse after the second world war, despite the important work done by the League of Nations in the inter-war period to develop a normative framework. The UN did create Unicef in 1946, but its aim was to help children whose parents had been killed in the war. It was a response to an emergency rather than a legal advance.   Three years after the war, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, despite its importance, made no mention of children’s rights, except the right to education and made childhood a mere adjunct to motherhood: “Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance.”   But such a potent concept — that of the power of the most vulnerable — was not going to go away, especially in the post-war world, when the decolonisation process that followed Indian independence (1947) focused attention on the plight of tens of millions of children. The UN, taking up the concepts of the League of Nations, patiently drafted the convention that would, after 10 years of difficult negotiations, be passed by the UN General Assembly in 1989. A child is a person, the convention declared, and as such has rights, even if conditions are attached to some of these rights and are applied in accordance with the child’s development.   But does a legal victory count in the real world? Has the lot of children fundamentally improved in the past 25 years? Did states ratify the convention for form’s sake without thinking about its implementation? The first response seems self-evident: children’s rights have become a political matter over the years.   No government, parliament or decision-making body can now ignore them. And public opinion, which until recently tolerated the most outrageous violations of children’s rights, has become sensitive to them.   There has also been another, equally essential sort of progress: mortality rates among young children have seen a spectacular drop in the past quarter century: the number of children under five who die annually from preventable causes has fallen over that period from 15 million to under seven million.   More children now go to school, girls in particular, who were previously seriously under-represented in education. Of course, advances of this sort are not all attributable to the convention, but it has made a powerful contribution to the political dynamic that has made them possible.   The battle has, of course, not yet been won. Can it ever be? There is still huge room for improvement. Violence against children still seems uncontrollable worldwide, whether in wars, in which they are targets (forcibly recruited as child soldiers; young girls abducted and raped), in economic exploitation in which child labour is a significant ingredient, or as victims of sexual violence, including within the family.   The struggle, which has been going on for centuries, is not a lost cause, but leaders of all kinds still need to be convinced that children’s rights cannot be subsumed within a generalised humanitarian vision, nor confined to a feminist ghetto or an appendix to public policy. For that to happen, the same decision-makers need to show some genius, the same genius that according to Baudelaire was “the ability to recapture childhood at will”.   * Claire Brisset held the post of Defender of the Rights of the Child in France from 2000 to 2006. Visit the related web page
	Markets, morals and civic life by Michael J Sandel The Atlantic, agencies USA   What are the reasons for the impoverished public discourse of our time? And what might a morally invigorated mode of political argument look like?   Almost without realising it, we have drifted from having market economies to becoming market societies. The difference is this: a market economy is a tool — a valuable and effective tool — for organising productive activity. But a market society is a place where almost everything is up for sale.   It is a way of life in which market values seep into social relations and govern every domain.   Why worry about this trend? For two reasons. First, as money looms larger in our societies, affluence, or the lack of it, matters more. If the main advantages of affluence were the ability to afford yachts and fancy vacations, then inequality would matter less than it does today. But as money governs access to education, healthcare, political influence, and safe neighbourhoods, life becomes harder for those of modest means. The marketisation of everything sharpens the sting of inequality.   Second, putting a price on all human activities can be corrupting. Consider voting. No democracies officially permit the buying and selling of votes. To sell my vote would be to degrade it, to corrupt its meaning as an expression of civic duty. But if a market in votes is objectionable because it corrupts democracy, what about systems of campaign finance (including the one currently in place in the US) that give wealthy donors a disproportionate voice in elections? The reason to reject a market in votes — preserving the integrity of democracy — may also be a reason to limit financial contributions to political candidates.   Of course, we often disagree about what counts as “corrupting” or “degrading”. To decide whether we should allow the buying and selling of human organs, for example, or whether we should hire mercenaries to fight our wars, we have to think through hard questions about human dignity and civic responsibility. But this suggests that market reasoning depends on moral reasoning.   The classical economists, going back to Adam Smith, rightly conceived of economics as a branch of moral and political philosophy. But the version of economics commonly taught today presents itself as an autonomous discipline, one that does not pass judgment on how income should be distributed or how this or that good should be valued. The notion that economics is a value-free science has always been questionable. But the more markets extend their reach into noneconomic aspects of life, the more entangled they become with moral questions.   In pluralist societies, we disagree about how to value goods, and so it is tempting to try to resolve our differences without bringing moral argument into politics. But this impulse is a mistake; it has contributed to the empty, hollow public discourse of our time. We should not ask citizens to leave their moral convictions at the door when they enter the public square. Instead, we should embrace a morally more robust public discourse, one that engages rather than avoids the moral convictions that citizens bring to public life.   http://www.justiceharvard.org/watch/ http://www.brennancenter.org/blog/cities-and-states-leading-fight-against-big-money http://www.bostonreview.net/us/stephen-bezruchka-inequality-kills http://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/11/on-social-justice-and-welfare/ http://talkpoverty.org http://robertreich.org/ http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/marshall-steinbaum-zucman-loomis-inequality-globalization Visit the related web page
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