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The Ruth Adler Human Rights Lecture 2023 – Ms Mama Fatima Singhateh

July 17, 2023 GJA Admin Child participation, Children's Rights, Human rights, Incorporation, International Law, Sale and sexual exploitation, Scotland, Sexual Violence, UK, UNCRC

On 14 March 2023, the Global Justice Academy hosted the Ruth Adler Human Rights Lecture by Ms Mama Fatima Singhateh, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Sale and Sexual Exploitation of Children. Focussed on the importance of child participation, she talked about her functions as Special Rapporteur, the human rights law regulating the principle of participation, the importance of applying this principle and the challenges and opportunities it faces. The connection between Ms Singhateh’s work as Special Rapporteur and focus on children’s participation is highly relevant here in Scotland in light of the role of child participation envisioned in the pending UNCRC Incorporation legislation and the Committee on the Rights of the Child’s most recent Concluding Observations on the UK’s implementation of the UNCRC.

The Special Rapporteur began by explaining her functions: In annual reports to the UN Human Rights Council and UN General Assembly on thematic studies, she addresses thematic issues such as the sexual exploitation of children online, sexual exploitation of children in travel and tourism, including in the context of major sports events; the sale and sexual exploitation of children through prostitution and child trafficking; and sale of children for illegal adoption, transfer of organs, child marriage and forced labour. Furthermore, she analyses the root causes of the sale and sexual exploitation of children, identifies new patterns of the phenomena, exchanges good practices to combat this scourge, promote measures to prevent it, and make recommendations for the rehabilitation of child victims and survivors of sale and sexual exploitation, primarily targeted towards Governments, UN bodies, the business sector and non-governmental organisations. In addition to the annual reports, the Special Rapporteur undertakes country visits, sends out communications to States and other stakeholders on individual cases of reported violations and concerns of a broader nature, engages in awareness-raising and advocacy to promote and protect children’s rights, provides advice for technical cooperation, and contributes to the development of international human rights standard. In exercising these functions, the Special Rapporteur prioritises access to child-friendly spaces. Furthermore, she dialogues with children and hears their thoughts on the issues her mandate addresses.

Then, the Special Rapporteur turned to the issue of child participation and the human rights law regulating the topic. Children’s participation is a principle emanating from Article 12 of the UNCRC on the right to be heard. Even though the UNCRC does not expressly use the term’ child participation’, she affirmed that ‘the term has evolved and is now widely used to describe ongoing processes, which include information-sharing and dialogue between children and adults based on mutual respect, and in which children can learn how their views and those of adults are taken into account and shape the outcome of such processes.’ The Special Rapporteur also referred to the UNCRC, in general terms, as the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. She recognised that children’s lives had been transformed by the UNCRC but affirmed that ‘there is, however, more work to be done to better promote and protect the rights of all children’. Finally, she made a particular reference to the UNCRC Incorporation (Scotland) Bill: While celebrating Scotland’s bold step in fully incorporating the UNCRC into Scottish legislation, she noted that the Scottish government must ensure that it follows through by reintroducing revised legislation so that effective implementation can begin.

When referring to the importance and application of child participation, the Special Rapporteur reminded the audience of the extent of article 12 of the UNCRC: ‘Children have a right to participate in any decision-making process affecting them as well as influence decisions taken on their behalf’. She affirmed that participation helps children develop confidence in their worldviews and value. Additionally, she recalled practical approaches that have created positive changes in ways of working with children, such as using child-friendly spaces and forums and including them in public policy development and monitoring.

Scottish Women’s Right Centre

A concrete example helped the audience to clearly understand Ms. Singhateh’s argument. The case was about role that children participation played in work carried out by an NGO against female genital mutilation (FGM). She explained that this secret practice was part of an initiation rite in a particular country. From focus groups with girls between 12 to 18 years old, the NGO learned about FMG and the rejection and embarrassment that it caused among them. With the active involvement of children, the NGO proposed restructuring the rite towards an ‘initiation without mutilation’. This turned into a successful campaign that produced a change in the places where it intervened and that was replicated in other communities. The lesson the Special Rapporteur takes from this example is ‘that deliberate and strategic actions to facilitate and create a conducive environment for children to participate in decisions about their lives can make a great difference in how the world perceives, protect, and promote their rights’.

In the last part of her lecture, the Special Rapporteur addressed the challenges and opportunities to child participation. By taking the audience through real-life stories she learned from survivors during her country visits, she highlighted the importance of raising awareness of the different manifestations of sexual abuse and sexual exploitation. She also referred to the government’s responsibility to design child protection policies that provide education and awareness raising, as well as ensure children have access to professionals where they can speak freely on any issue happening to them at home. In addition, she highlighted the need to provide professionals with skills and tools to effectively communicate with children, especially victims and survivors who have suffered abuse.

The Special Rapporteur also recommended involving children as trainers and facilitators of child participation and explained how they could participate at international-level gatherings designed for children and adults. Ms Singhateh concluded her lecture by ’emphasising the need to provide children with the opportunity to be heard, influence decision-making and achieve change’.

In line with the practical approach that Ms Singhateh gives to her mandate, she also accompanied the director of the GJA, Dr Kasey McCall-Smith, to a session of the human rights clinic. Students working on issues relating to the prohibition against torture and child rights budgeting were able to share their work with her and receive her questions and comments.

Ms Singhateh’s mandate as Special Rapporteur on the Sale and Sexual Exploitation of Children was extended for another three years. We look forward to reading more about her innovative efforts on enhancing children participation in her endeavours on promoting and advancing their human rights.

This post was written by Valentina Rioseco Vallejos. Valentina is a Chilean lawyer who holds an LLM in Human Rights from the University of Edinburgh. She is currently studying a PhD in Law, focused on incorporating a human rights approach to irregular migration. Valentina is a Research Assistant for the Global Justice Academy.

child participation, Children's Rights, Human Rights, Human rights legal clinic, Incorporation, international law, Ms Mama Fatima Singhateh, Ruth Adler Lecture, sale and sexual exploitation of children, UN Special Rapporteur, UNCRC, United Nations, women's rights

Reflections on UN Special Procedures

December 10, 2021 GJA Admin Asia, Blog, Global Justice Academy, Human rights, UN

On 4 November 2021, the Global Justice Academy together with the Edinburgh Centre for Global and International Law hosted their first in-person seminar for the 2021-22 academic year at Edinburgh Law School. Professor Rhona K.M. Smith, who served two three-year terms as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Cambodia, engaged the audience with her reflections on UN Special Procedures. She is a Professor of International Human Rights and was head of Newcastle Law School at Newcastle University from 2016 to 2020.

UN human rights envoy Rhona Smith holds a press conference at the conclusion of her mission to the Kingdom yesterday. KT/Khem Sovannara

To ground her reflections, she opened with an overview on the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council, and the distinctions between country and thematic mandates. She took the audience through the procedures for appointing the mandate holders and gave insight into gender and geographical balances and imbalances. Many in the audience were shocked to hear about the amount of time a UN Special Rapporteur dedicates to their mandate and particularly in light of the fact it is an unpaid position. Prof Smith critically reflected on the reasons given by the UN Human Rights Council for maintaining the unremunerated status of these roles. The Human Rights Council asserts that this gives independence to the experts, however, Prof Smith recognized that, in reality, not all experts or potential experts could afford this privilege. Ultimately, she said ‘you need money to live’. This subject stimulated a lively discussion later in the session.

The core of Prof Smith’s discussion focused on her behind-the-scenes experiences as a Special Rapporteur. She elaborated the three main roles of UN Special Procedures: advising, monitoring and reporting. Each of these roles serves a specific purpose in relation to fulfilling the mandate and each is enabled or limited in direct relation to the resources allocated to facilitate the work.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) plays a fundamental role is supporting the UN Special Procedures mandates. Prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, Prof Smith travelled on missions to Cambodia twice a year and reinforced the importance of communicating with the country through the OHCHR. Security measures were of upmost importance as every UN Special Procedure faces common death threats and other harassment. During missions, Prof Smith was able to gather information on the ground and meet with high-level government actors in order to develop a multilayered picture of human rights in Cambodia. She reflected on how she could make the most out of these visits because she knew the country already since she had lived there before being appointed to the UN mandate. During these meetings, she highlighted situations that would entail human rights violations, and suggested concrete actions that State actors could adopt to protect, respect and fulfil the human rights of people living in Cambodia.

In the end, Prof Smith reinforced that being a UN Special Procedure was both ‘a huge honour and an amazing challenge’. On the one side, she was able to deepen her knowledge of human rights in practice and steer the improvement of the human rights for Cambodians. On the other, she faced the challenge of becoming a public figure in Cambodia and the risks associated with that publicity.

In closing the event, Prof Smith narrated a day in the shoes of a UN Special Procedure during a mission and reflected on how her experience contributed to her human rights teaching. Her frankness and honesty helped the audience understand what it means to be a UN Special Rapporteur. While there are clearly challenges, the rewards in assuming such a role within the UN, she demonstrated the practical importance that UN Special Procedures play in advancing the global protection, promotion and respect for human rights.

Events, Human Rights, Newspost, OHCHR, United Nations

De-Mystifying The G-Word: Enforcement and Success of the Genocide Convention

November 2, 2020 GJA Admin Africa, Atrocities, Balkans, Conflict, Genocide, Human rights, Students participate!, Teaching, UN

UN Photo/Evan Schneider – 70th Anniversary of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

This post by is by Oskar Granskogen Kjorstad, Alexandra Haider and Tess Gallagher. They are students enrolled in PLIT10063 ‘Human Rights in International Relations’, an honours-level course in the School of Social and Political Sciences that explores the political and legal issues surrounding the international enforcement of human rights. As part of their online tutorial activities, students were asked to prepare a blog post about the enforcement of the Genocide Convention. This piece was selected as the standout among the many excellent submissions, chosen for its incisive commentary on the Darfur crisis and its excellent discussion of the Convention’s broader application.

There is no shortage of forgotten conflicts in history that briefly capture the world’s attention on their way through the news cycle before the next noteworthy event promptly takes their place in the spotlight. Darfur is an especially painful example of such a conflict. State-supported and ethnically motivated violence against the civilian population of Darfur has caused enormous suffering. Yet despite calls from civil society for states to intervene on the grounds that they are obligated to under the Genocide Convention, the international community took no meaningful action to stop the violence. What explains the apathy of the international community and the difficulty of enforcing the Genocide Convention in relation to Darfur?

One of the most basic problems with the enforcement of the Genocide Convention is the difficulty of consistently and accurately applying the legal definition of genocide to cases of mass violence. The Genocide Convention defines genocide as “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”. Different international courts have variously understood this definition. In Srebrenica, the ICTY ruled that the murder of 7-8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys met the legal definition of genocide, though this case was less obviously a genocide than the Holocaust, which led to the Convention. In spite of the wide span in cases identified as genocides, the ICC determined that the violence in Darfur did not amount to “the crime of crimes”- not because the violence was less horrific than expected, but because the particular nature of the violence was deemed not to meet the legal definition of genocide. The U.S., as well as many NGOs and scholars, reached the opposite conclusion. This lack of legal clarity makes it harder to effectively identify cases of genocide, which is a problem in the enforcement of the Genocide Convention. Confusion caused by these legal debates can be used as an excuse by states not to use the word “genocide”, and so avoid pressure to act and subsequent legal obligations to end mass-atrocities.

If the definitional issue is overcome, another obstacle as to why the Genocide Convention is so rarely invoked lies in the semantic power of the word. Sardonically labelled ‘The G Word’, there is often a reluctance to utilise the word for fear of its connotations. Many argue that the term denotes absolute, totemic evil and thus should be treated with caution when used in political discourse. As a result, it is often replaced with other, more (supposedly) palatable alternatives, such as ‘ethnic-cleansing’. Examples of this were seen in the US’ refusal to condemn and recognise the Armenian Genocide; choosing instead to refer to it by the Armenian language phrase ‘Meds Yeghern’, or ‘Great Catastrophe’. This was not without external pressure- such power does the word have that US officials were threatened with losing access to military bases in Turkey if they were to vocalise it. Of course, strategic imperatives often trump moral ones; and evasive terminology in this case appeared the only way to conciliate all sides.

Once the word is invoked however, the game appears to change. If word is weapon, does saying it signify battle? In cases such as Darfur, it appears not. Despite internationalcondemnation and adducing of the Genocide Convention, the violence in Sudan still continues. Numerous resolutions have passed all with limited, if not weak, success. This leads many scholars and critics to question the legitimacy of the Genocide Convention; does it exist to appease, rather than to act?

Given the poor track record of the state system in preventing genocides, there’s a good case to be made for the former. A key explanation for this is that states put their self-interest above their obligation to prevent and punish genocide. States may circumscribe their response in ways that falls short of stopping the atrocities because they don’t see total involvement as self-serving. Upon examination of the crisis in Darfur, this fundamental challenge to the enforcement of the Convention is evident. While the U.S. publicly recognised the crisis as a genocide, Secretary of State Colin Powell asserted that,

UN Photo/Evan Schneider

since the U.S. was already putting political pressure on authorities in Khartoum to halt the violence and was providing humanitarian aid to civilians, nothing more was required of it; the U.S. did not have to act to the extent that the Convention required because it was already pursuing narrow unilateral action. Similarly, although it is not formally labeled a genocide, Kurds are being killed en masse in Syria. While the U.S. has supported Kurdish rebels in the past, President Trump pulled American troops out of Syria in October 2019 on the basis that the conflict had “nothing to do with [the U.S.]”, effectively leaving the Kurds without means to protect themselves. A problem that feeds into this is the absence of a clear enforcement mechanism to make states comply with their obligation to prevent genocide. All states are equally obliged to prevent genocide, which leads to a bystander effect by which no one feels obliged to make the first move.

These are some of the reasons why Darfur stands as a painful reminder of the difficulty and political unwillingness of keeping the promise of “never again”.

Armenia, Darfur, ethnic-cleansing, Genocide, Genocide Convention, United Nations