While we are writing, thinking and discussing about children’s rights, one of their most important rights is being violated: the right to shelter and food. In Haiti the situation is worse than disastrous. There is help from all over the world, water and food are being supplied and medical care is being given wherever possible.

There was a time, as late as the early twentieth century, when women in the west weren’t allowed to vote, when leading universities like Cambridge and Harvard didn’t give them equal status (women students went to Radcliffe, not Harvard, and Cambridge didn’t give out degrees to women students till 1947, though they were allowed to sit for exams!) and when their main role was to be a homemaker

For the last few weeks Humanists, rationalists and human rights activists have been waging a huge battle against the forces of fundamentalism in Andhra Pradesh in South India. This is a battle that involves all sections of society, including the media, the police, the justice system, aggressive fundamentalists, the Dalai Lama as well as Humanists and rationalists.

Barbara Bennett Woodhouse is among the United States’ foremost experts on children’s rights. She joined the Emory University Law faculty in 2009 as the L.Q.C. Lamar Chair in Law. She also serves as the co-director of the Barton Child Law and Policy Clinic. Her scholarship and teaching focus on child law, child welfare, comparative and international family law and constitutional law.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), signed in 1989, has been opened to ratification since November 1989.

This Convention has been ratified by the French Government, but:
1. Formal restrictions have been introduced, on several Articles:
a. On Article 6, in order to avoid any application in France which could reduce the right of women to abortion

All over the world it is considered ‘normal’ for women to give birth to children. It is also ‘normal’ to view children as the future of a family, a village, a town, a nation, the world even. It is therefore hard to understand why children had to wait until November 20 1989 for the Convention on the Rights of the Child to be accepted by the United Nations.

Child abuse is universal. It has no national, regional or local boundaries. It is recognised as a crime. Recruiting children for wars, using kids for sex and trafficking, mutilation of female genitals in young girls, making children work as labourers and similar issues are declared as violations of the rights of the child by the UN. There are acts to prohibit child marriage.

Since the 1980s, advocates for children have increasingly agreed that children need their rights to be protected by international law. Charity is not enough to protect children around the world.

Child witchcraft is the superstitious belief that children can be witches and wizards or that infants can or do magically turn themselves into birds or insects to suck blood or mysteriously inflict harm. It is the belief that children have evil powers, which they can use to destroy people, particularly their family or neighbours.

Kenya has a population of 15 million children, constituting 54 percent of the total of 28 million. Over 12.6 million Kenyans, majority of who are children, live in absolute poverty.