Second Quarter 2002 Newsletter

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The World Federation for Mental Health sent four representatives to the Special Session of the General Assembly on Children which was held on 8-10 May at UN Headquarters in New York. They were President Elect Patt Franciosi, Main Representative Nancy Wallace, the Federations Representative to UNICEF, Carol Kessler, and a WFMH member, Richard Donahue. Another WFMH Representative, Ricki Kantrowitz, attended the NGO events associated with the Special Session.

This major meeting included high-level government representation (together with 240 children in the official delegations), and 1,700 NGO representatives. The official government conference involved many private meetings and intense final negotiations among coalition groupings. The NGO delegates held many meetings of their own and came together in advocacy groups to press specific issues such as the right to education, and opposition to child labor, the sexual exploitation of children, and the recruitment of children in armies. Young people were very visible in presenting their views.

The Special Session was the culmination of a long process of prior negotiations among governments, and had been postponed from September 2001. The much anticipated event proved in the end to be generally disappointing, as the governments engaged in last-minute negotiations in which the Western powers took the outcome document in unexpected directions.

The reproductive rights of young people (and the question of abortion) became a central issue, polarizing the Session between those who favored empowering adolescent women through education and reproductive health services and those took a conservative view focused on medical care during pregnancy. The United States took a strong conservative stand against the inclusion of abortion in reproductive care, while the European Union finally reduced its backing for reproductive services in exchange for a somewhat limited reference to the abolition of the death penalty for adolescents who have committed crimes.

                           
Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director General of the World Health Organization (right)
and Patt Franciosi, President Elect of WFMH, at the WHO photo call in the lobby of the UN Headquarters
following Dr. Brundtland’s address on “The Last Mile to End Polio” at the Special Session on Children.

The final document does not refer to reproductive health services for adolescents, but calls for ready and affordable access to essential obstetric carepost-partum care and family planning in order to, inter alia, promote safe motherhood. Critics considered the final document was a substantial step backwards from the UN Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 and the follow-up conference Beijing plus 5 in 2000.

Government negotiations on child labor also led to compromises, which resulted in failure to adopt the standards promoted by the International Labor Organization. In the weakened final text, there was no mention of a minimum age for child workers. It referred to the worst forms of child labor (that is, trafficking in children and the recruitment of child soldiers) rather than children who are pushed into the workforce by poverty, and have no chance of full-time education. A proposal to compile new data on child labor was dropped. Even provisions related to humanitarian aid for children in displaced families and in armed conflicts were dropped.

Many NGOs were disappointed that the outcome document of the conference did not give a central place to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely ratified UN Convention (though not signed by the United States). It has been used by many countries to strengthen childrens rights at the national level, and has valuable provisions for collecting information. This years WFMH World Mental Health Day planning kit highlighted the importance of the Convention, and a number of other issues on the Special Sessions agenda.

[Source: On the Record for Children was a useful resource for this report. It is the newsletter of the NGO Committee for UNICEF, a network of 125 NGOs that work closely with UNICEF. Past issues can be found at the NGO Committees website: www.ngosatunicef.org]