Pope Francis convened a high-level summit Monday to demand that children be shielded from war, forced labor, trafficking and exploitation, throwing his moral authority behind a worldwide initiative to uphold kid’s fundamental rights despite the Catholic Church’s own poor record in protecting them from sexual abuse.
Queen Rania of Jordan opened the summit, recalling that the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child is probably the most widely ratified human rights convention in history but is hardly enforced on an equal plane.
“In theory, the worldwide consensus is evident: every right, for each child,” she told the gathering within the Apostolic Palace. “Yet, so many children world wide are excluded from its promise -– particularly in warzones. Worse yet, people have grown desensitized to their pain.”
She cited a psychological study on Gaza’s most vulnerable children, after greater than a 12 months of living through the Israel-Hamas war, that found 96% believed their death was imminent, and half said they desired to die. “How did we let our humanity come to this?” she asked.
Italian Sen. Liliana Segre, a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, told the gathering that she was denied the fitting to education when Italy’s fascist-era racial laws went into effect in 1938 and Jewish children were barred from school.
“We were surrounded by an indifference that sometimes is worse than violence,” she said.
Segre has spent her life teaching today’s youth about antisemitism and the necessity to not look away when injustices occur, and has paid the worth. “I’m the oldest woman on the planet with a police escort and am insulted and threatened, despite not having done anything,” she said.
Francis, for his part, listed the tragic summary of plights facing a whole lot of tens of millions of today’s children: conflicts, homelessness, trafficking and compulsory marriage. He also referred to the 150 million stateless or “invisible” children who weren’t registered at birth or don’t have any documents after they migrate.
“This is an obstacle to their accessing education or health care, yet worse still, since they don’t enjoy legal protection, they’ll easily be abused or sold as slaves,” he said.
He cited Myanmar’s Rohingya children, in addition to the undocumented migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexican border. “Those first victims of that exodus of despair and hope made by the hundreds of individuals coming from the South towards the United States of America, and plenty of others,” he said.
Several speakers cited the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, the U.N. treaty ratified by 196 countries which sets out the basic rights all children enjoy, including the fitting to life, nationality, freedom of thought and religion, health and education. It calls for signatories to take all appropriate measures to guard children from harm and to place children’s interests above all else.
The Holy See, a U.N. observer state, ratified the convention in 1990.
In 2014, the committee overseeing its implementation strongly criticized the Holy See for the worldwide sex abuse and cover-up scandal and asked the Vatican to report back on implementing its recommendations by 2017. Countries are often late in complying with such recommendations, and the Holy See has yet to submit a recent country report.
More recently, a gaggle of U.N. special rapporteurs who monitor specific human rights problems wrote to the Holy See in 2021 expressing concern about “persistent” cases of abuse, cover-up and obstruction by the Catholic Church in interfering with victims’ efforts to pursue justice for his or her abuse.
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