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Summarized by Kent Larsen
LDS Area President Urges Australian Action On UN's 'Children's Rights'
(Conventional behaviour)
Sydney Australia Morning Herald 4Mar00 N6
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA -- Elder Bruce C. Hafen, the Area President for the
LDS Church's Australian/New Zealand Area, is urging Australia to
withdraw its support of the United Nations' International Convention
on the Rights of the Child (UNCROC). Hafen argues that the
convention goes beyond the traditional concern with the care and
protection of children, giving them instead legal and personal
autonomy -- sometimes at the expense of their parent's ability to
raise them.
The convention has become a tool used in political debate in
Australia, used to criticize the government and argue in court cases,
where the signed conventions have gained the weight of law. The
United States has not signed UNCROC, but in Australia it has been
used in a child custody case. In the case one lawyer argued that the
international conventions were only 'advisory,' with no impact on
Australian law. But the judge rejected this claim, leaving many
politicians, who had argued for the convention's approval, scrambling
to pass laws to limit the effects of the conventions.
Some international law experts say this is a lot of debate over
nothing. ANU international law professor Hilary Charlesworth says
UNCROC shouldn't be a source of dispute, "These are heavily
negotiated, very general statements of principle that most people
would accept," she says.
But Hafen disagrees. A former BYU law professor, Haven wrote a 1996
Harvard International Law Journal article on UNCROC exploring its
principal that children should have equal rights with adults, noting
that U.S. courts rejected that position 20 years earlier, after which
child autonomy advocates took their cause to the UN. He observes that
U.S. lawyer Cynthia Price Cohen, who helped develop UNCROC, has
proudly proclaimed that the convention gives children a "totally new
right" through the convention. This right gives children adult-style
civil rights such as "speech, religion, association, assembly and the
right to privacy."
As a result, the convention tries to remove age as a criterion of
competence in children and challenges parental rights to control
access to information for children. Hafen says that he isn't agains
having the United Nations. To the contrary, he wants the UN to
support child protection. But he isn't in favor of UNCROC as it is
drafted.
Hafen argues that Australia should try to change UNCROC, "The
international community needs Australia's leadership to revise its
earlier ratification, thereby sending a message of caution to UN
drafting groups whose novel agendas are often revealed only after
ratification." Australia passed the convention without any
significant restrictions. Most countries that did pass the convention
put restrictions on it, allowing them to interpret it for their own
laws. The U.S. abstained from signing, mainly, according to Hafen,
over issues of sovereignty.
The Morning Herald notes that other countries are also having trouble
with the convention after they signed it. Britain has been criticized
for laws that allow parents to control whether or not children are
enrolled in sex education classes because the UNCROC committee says
parent's shouldn't have the right to exclude children from these
courses. And in Sweden the committee objected to a Swedish Supreme
Court decision that male circumcision is "not a crime against the
child".
But the Morning Herald is skeptical about chances that Australia's
government will review the convention. It says that pressures from
the International NGO community makie it difficult to give UN
conventions proper scrutiny before passage.
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