Children’s rights to celebrate 20th anniversary

The Convention was signed in New York on 20 November 1989 and came into force on 2 September 1990. It sets out the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of children worldwide, bounding by international law the countries that have ratified it. As of December 2003, 193 countries have ratified the CRC, including every member of the UN, except for the United States and Somalia. Somalia was finally able to sign the Convention in 2002 but, due to a state of political uncertainty, is not yet able to ratify it.

The United States has not yet ratified the Convention despite its active role in the drafting process. The country commented and contributed on nearly all its articles, three of which come directly from the US Constitution and were put forward by the Reagan administration. The reason for its non ratification is primarily due to the fact that some states allow for children to be subjected to the death penalty, an outright violation of the CRC’s Article 6 which stipulates that “State parties recognise that every child has the inherent right to life” and Article 37 which clearly states that ”no child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without the possibility of release shall be imposed for offences committed by persons below eighteen years of age“.

However, in 2005, the US Supreme Court declared the execution of juveniles as unconstitutional, following the Roper v. Simmons trial (No. 03-633: 1 March 2005). Before then, the possibility of capital punishment for juvenile offenders above the age of 16 was upheld (Thompson v. Oklahoma and Stanford v. Kentucky) until the new millennium brought on a wave of evolution of standards. In 2002, a Supreme Court decision stated that the execution of the mentally disabled was to be considered as cruel and unusual punishment and therefore as unconstitutional. This gave the momentum for the Court to begin questioning the execution of minors. Indeed, in the Simmons case, the Court noted that almost every state prohibited those under the age of 18 from voting, serving on juries, marrying without parental consent, which begged the question of why things should be any different for something as serious and irreversible as the death penalty. Moreover, the Court found that minors are more prone to caving into negative influences and peer pressure and have less control, or even experience of control, over their surrounding environment.

The Supreme Court also looked at other countries that supported and practiced the execution of minors between 1990 and 2005 and found that the US was one among seven other countries to have applied the death penalty to juvenile offenders in that time frame along with Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and China. However, since 1990, the aforementioned countries have either abolished this form of capital punishment or publicly disavowed it. The US “now stands alone in a world that has turned its face against the juvenile death penalty“, admitted the US Supreme Court in the Roper v. Simmons decision.

One of the last juvenile executions in the US was that of Napoleon Beazley in 2002, who was 17 when he shot the father of a federal judge. The execution warrant was signed by Rick Perry, current Republican Governor or Texas, who signed his 200th warrant in June 2009, largely surpassing Bush’s record of 152, who was known as the “Texecutioner“ in his days as Governor.

The arguments against ratification of the CRC, usually led by more conservative Americans, are often in contradiction. According to former Senator Jesse Helms, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1995 to 2001, the CRC is a “bag of worms” that will “chip away at the US Constitution“, quotes T. Jeremy Gunn in his book The Religious Right and the Opposition to US Ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. And yet, a majority of the American people dismiss the CRC in saying “we already have in place everything the treaty espouses; it would make no practical difference“, underlines Roger Levesque, “Child Advocacy in the United States and the Power of International Human Rights Law” in Children as Equals. If all elements of the Convention already exist in the US Constitution, how could the former chip away at the latter, especially when considering that some of the Convention’s article were largely based on the US Constitution and were greatly influenced by America during the drafting process.

President Barack Obama has described the non ratification of the CRC as “embarrassing” and promised to review this when asked, during the Walden University Presidential Debate in October 2008, whether “as President, [the candidates] would seek the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child“. While the US has historically been very cautious when it comes to treaty ratifications, the CRC has been around for 20 years now and ratification is long overdue. Let’s hope the American government does not wait 28 years like it did for the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and that Obama will keep his pre-election promise.


Emilie Melvin
Freedom of Thought