ImmigrantChildren.ca Archive

Category: Rights of the Child

  • Canadian Council on Refugees annual report, 2008

    The Canadian Council on Refugees (CCR) Annual Status Report on Refugee and Immigrant Rights in Canada, 2008 addresses three items related to immigrant and refugee children’s rights and family issues:

    Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) adopted new guidelines for officers conducting eligibility interviews with children making refugee claims, including children separated from their parent(s).
    CIC responded to concerns about families kept separate by the “excluded family member” rule by intervening to reunite several families and initiating measures for internal processes. Processing times still significantly lag.
    Changes to the Citizenship Act raises concerns among some about the “stateless child”: a child born abroad to Canadian parents (who were themselves born abroad to a Canadian citizen) will not be Canadian citizens.

    See the full report at the CCR site.

  • BIOTC conference, Toronto

    UNICEF Canada, The Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children, the Faculty of Law and David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights, University of Toronto and Justice for Children and Youth are holding a conference on the Best Interests of the Child: Meaning and Application in Canada February 27-28, 2009 at the Faculty of Law, UofT. The conference is supported by Heritage Canada.
    Taken from the conference website:

    “The Best Interests of the Child is one of the basic principles in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It has been interpreted and applied in different ways in a variety of different contexts in Canada. In 2003, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recommended that Canada work toward a common understanding and more consistent application of the principle, at the level of public policy formation as well as in decision-making for individual children. 
    “The objective of this conference is to deepen understanding of the principle, share experiences of its application, and identify good practices for implementation in Canada. The intended outcome of the initiative is a more common understanding of the principle and improved implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Canada, including publication of significant findings”.

    Organizers are open to receiving submissions for panel presentation and facilitating workshops.  For more information, see the conference website or contact bnoakes@unicef.ca.

  • The Universal Declaration of Human Rights ~ 60 years later

    The Association for Canadian Studies hosts a conference on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 60 Years Later December 9/08 in Montréal, Québec.
    Session themes include:

    • Rights of the child
    • Citizenship
    • Migration.

    A pre-conference day honours the late Jacques Hébert. See the ACS website for more information on both events.

  • Microsoft is KIND to unaccompanied children

    Microsoft has launched KIND – Kids In Need of Defense – a funding program that will provide unaccompanied minor migrant children in the United States with legal support. $14.5 million is being shared among nine states in the US for the next three years. See the news story at The Seattle Times.

  • UNICEF news release on UK commitment to protecting rights of immigrant children

    UNICEF Applauds UK Commitment to Protecting Rights of Immigrant Children

    “NEW YORK, 22 September 2008 – UNICEF applauds the decision by the British government to grant children seeking asylum, migrant children, and those who have been trafficked into the UK the same rights as British children, including their right to education, health care and social services. The government also removed its reservation to article 37(c) on children in custody.
    “The move, made over the weekend, signals the government’s full commitment to supporting children’s rights as laid out in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The decision paves the way for vulnerable children who are subject to immigration control to enjoy the fundamental human rights spelled out in the Convention for every child, and to ensure that children who find themselves in trouble with the law are kept separate from adult prisoners”.

  • Child migration report by Save the Children, Sweden

    Child Migration and the Construction of Vulnerability, Save the Children, Sweden, “attempts to look beyond the current emphasis of child migration (mainly trafficking of children for sexual purposes, unaccompanied asylum seekers and refugee children), to consider the broader context including when and why migration violates the rights of the child“.
    First presented at the Focus on Children in Migration conference in Poland in 2007, the report demonstrates the need for more research on children and migration. As the introduction to the report says “Many reports are available on migration in general but rarely integrate the consequences of migration for children“.

  • Child rights situation analysis

    Save the Children, Sweden have produced a toolkit for organizations interested in conducting what’s called a child rights situation analysis – or, a way to collect relevant information, identify key issues, establish priorities to enable an assessment of what action steps ought to be taken to improve the lives of children.
    Featured in the resource is child rights program principles – CRP. CRP outlines the relationship between the rights holder and the duty bearer. The principles include:

    • Children’s right to have their best interests considered as a primary consideration in any decision-making which affects them
    • Children’s right to the maximum available resources for their survival and development
    • Children’s right to have their views heard in decision making when it affects their lives
    • Children’s rights to be protected against all forms of negative discrimination and to be positively discriminated against when at a disadvantage, relative to other children
    • The duty bearer is accountable to respect and for the protection and fulfillment of the rights of the child.

    Read about and download the toolkit from the Child Rights Information Network.

  • Right to Play at the OPHEA conference

    Right to Play will be presenting their curriculum Learning to Play, Playing to Learn at the Oct 17-18/08 Ontario Physical Health and Education Association (OPHEA) conference
    It is heartening to see the description of the session highlighting the rights of the child:

    “Activities feature an exploration of children around the world, the countries they live in and a study of our rights and responsibilities in the world community”.

  • Child Watch Column by Marian Wright Edelman (Children's Defense Fund)

    An excerpt of the Child Watch column of the Children’s Defense Fund, taken from the NAME listserv (National Association for Multicultural Education), posted Aug 22/08:

    Immigration Enforcement: Raiding Children’s Dreams

    “On May 12, 2008, teachers in Potsville, Iowa, interrupted their classes, called the names of some of their Latino students and directed them to report to the principal’s office. Usually, this would mean that they were in for punishment for some infraction. But these children had done nothing wrong. In the principal’s office, they were informed that one or in some cases, both of their parents would not be coming home because they had been taken into custody by federal law enforcement officers.

    “Earlier that day, hundreds of helmeted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in combat gear, toting assault rifles, swooped down on the Agriprocessors kosher meat processing plant in this town of about 3,000. With military precision, nearly 400 of the plant’s alleged undocumented immigrant workers were shackled and marched out of the slaughterhouse in single file and herded onto buses and vans. Those rounded up in the raid, one of the biggest in our nation’s history, were transported to detention facilities miles away. The raid not only economically devastated the town but also left in its trail hundreds of children wondering when or even if they would see their parents again. Postville was just one of a series of ICE raids in search of undocumented immigrants.

    “According to a report by the National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute, “Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America’s Children,” there are about five million children in the United States with at least one undocumented parent. The stepped-up ICE raids have put the children of these families at increased risk of separation, psychological distress and economic hardship. These raids have disrupted communities across the country and separated thousands of parents from their children. The majority of these children are American citizens who are integrated into the schools and communities of the only country they know. After the arrest or disappearance of their parents, children have experienced psychological duress and developed mental health problems including feelings of abandonment, separation anxiety disorder, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

    “The ‘Paying the Price’ report states that the raids affect children, who are “emotionally, financially and developmentally dependent on their parents’ care, protection and earnings.” Children and other family members left behind face serious and immediate economic hardships when the primary breadwinner has been hauled off into custody. The majority of the children affected are under the age of 10~many are infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. Their immediate needs are for food, baby formula, diapers, clothing and other essentials. One of the great challenges for the communities where raids are carried out is to ensure that no child has been left behind in school, left at home without adult supervision or taken into foster care. Some children have been left in the care of teenagers or even babysitters for weeks and months at a time. Those who suffer the greatest harm in ICE raids are children. If our nation is to make any claim for humanity, children deserve to be protected and cared for when their parents are taken away.

    Related links: 

    The Children’s Defense Fund

    Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America’s Children. 

    The Right to Learn: Access to Public Education for Non-Status Immigrants (Community Social Planning Council of Toronto).

  • Migrant minors in France

    Both the Terres des Hommes and the Child Rights Information Network (CRIN) are reporting on France’s treatment of unaccompanied minors. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child have also weighed in, saying they are “deeply concerned” that migrant children are being sent back to their countries of origin without proper investigation and where they may be exposed to exploitation. See the CRIN site for more info.