Protecting Women and Children around the World?

The United Nations Human Rights Committee has submitted a new draft General Comment to article 6’s guarantee of right to life in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that mandates that member states provide women access to abortion in certain cases. Article 6 of the Covenant guarantees that “Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.” The Human Rights Committee, however, is mandating that states allow women to abort their children.

Regent University School of Law’s Center for Global Justice is submitting a comment to the Human Rights Committee to demand that they change the language in the General Comment.

Abortion certainly takes life from children, but it also never supports true liberty for women.  Rather, abortion manipulates women to irrevocably harm their own children, and themselves.  One would think the global human rights community would want to protect what’s best for women and children, rather than expanding and mandating harms to them both.

Banning Fatherhood?

Fatherhood has officially been banned on FreeTV in Australia. 

Rod Drehr’s American Conservative article on this highlights the political nature of gendered parenting when special interest groups feel threatened by fatherhood, and images of children needing a daddy around.  

Many western nations are experiencing a crisis in father absence in their children’s lives.  This phenomenon is not unrelated to family breakdown, marriage decline, and sexual orientation emphases. 

In Rethinking Mom and Dad, I consider state statutory codes defining what is in the best interests of a child, and explore those legal rules from perspectives of pediatric medicine, social science, constitutional requirements, and federal law and policy in determining if it is truly in a child’s best interests to have both a mom and a dad.  The article concludes with a discussion of dual gendered parenting imperatives, while offering innovative resolutions to the best interests of children missing either a mom or a dad.  See the banned Daddy ad here.

Politics aside, kids really do need their dads.  Family restoration requires adults to put children’s needs above any political agenda and provide what is truly in their best interests.

U.N. Human Rights Not Protecting Children

In his address to the United Nations today President Donald Trump stated that "it is a massive source of embarrassment for the United Nations that some governments with egregious human rights records sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council.”  President Trump made the remark in his debut address to the United Nations General Assembly today as part of a broader call for the UN to make reforms.  Read more here.

Many of these human rights abuses are against children and their families around the world.   Suffer the Children: How the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Has Not Supported Children, 22 N.Y. Int’l. L. Rev. 57 (Summer 2009), discusses how the UN has allowed the trafficking and sale of children for years, despite the pronouncement of rights for children in the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC).  And most recently, 25 years after the UN’s adoption of the CRC in 1989, A Brief Assessment of the 25-Year Effect of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, (presented at the International Scholars Association, Toronto, CA, March 25, 2014; published at 23 Cardozo J. Int’l. & Compar. L. 323 (2015)) discusses the facts regarding the plight of children around the globe despite the human rights protections supposedly established for children in the CRC.

This report provides a small window of insight regarding the continuation and growth of atrocities experienced by children in numbers large enough to demand attention.  These atrocities include child sex trafficking, child slavery, child soldiering, child marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM), and child sacrifice.  How can children still be subject to such cruelty at the 25th Anniversary of the CRC?  This report challenges not only whether the CRC has been a success for children, but why it has not protected them from such heinous atrocities. The third part of this report discusses what can legitimately be done to improve the lives of children in signatory nations away from these atrocities by offering an interdisciplinary approach of legal, governmental, and social professionals toward more than simply CRC implementation, but actual child protection.

Family restoration includes global protection of children as a matter of basic human rights.

DACA & Child-Focused Immigration Reform

Can DACA and a focus on children be the impetus for true immigration reform in America?

Berkeley's La Raza law journal published Prof. Kohm and Keila Molina's ('12) piece on solutions to immigration conflicts involving children. Of particular importance to the current DACA debate is Part III of Are We There Yet? Immigration Reform for the Best Interests of Children, 23 Berkeley La Raza L. J. 77 (2013), which discusses some child-centered answers and resolutions that both state and federal governments face in illegal immigration.

Focusing on children is the path to the future for America, in immigration reform and in family restoration.