“[South Africa’s] politicians, attorneys and judges are showing other nations how to develop a legal system from scratch that recognizes children as rights holders.”
“When you look at the effects of colonialism in Africa and the tremendous disadvantages that slavery, exclusion and apartheid have had on the African people, the rapidity with which they’re recovering from this exploitation is highly impressive,” she says. “Looking at the amount of legislation being drafted, being adopted, the judicial decisions being issued … it’s virtually impossible to stay on top of everything.”
T
he idea that children, as the most vulnerable members of society, have special and unique rights developed in Britain and the United States in the late 1800s around the issues of abuse and horrific work conditions for children. In 1920, Eglantyne Jebb, who had been deeply moved by the suffering of child victims of the Balkan Wars and then World War I, founded Save the Children as a way of funneling aid to German and Austrian children. Four years later, believing that children needed some kind of legal scaffolding to ensure their protection in times of war and peace, Jebb drafted the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child, which the League of Nations adopted in 1924. Children’s rights advanced further with the formation of UNICEF in 1948, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child in 1959 and the U.N. Convention on the Rights and Welfare of the Child in 1989. The 1989 treaty is the most widely and rapidly ratified human rights treaty in the world. African nations were underrepresented in the drafting process, which lasted 10 years. But those nations ratified the U.N. Convention and simultaneously began drafting the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC), which the Organization of African Unity adopted in 1990. Unlike the U.N. treaty, the ACRWC reflects Africa’s unique cultural heritage, history and family values and asserts that children have rights as well as responsibilities.
Professor Warren Binford, director of the Clinical Law program at Willamette University, visits SOS Children’s Village in Cape Town, South Africa. SOS Children’s Villages provide homes for orphaned and abandoned children. Eight to 10 children are cared for in small family-type homes and are raised like brothers and sisters.
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