Child protection can unite Asean

Vitit Muntarbhorn is a Professor Emeritus at the Law Faculty of Chulalongkorn University. He is a former UN Special Rapporteur on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. (File photo)

Is the 50-year-old Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) still young at heart? Much of the Asean region in fact will be faced with an ageing population in the coming decades. Meanwhile, the interface between children and the protection of their rights will still be a pervasive challenge.

Issues, such as children in situations of poverty, child labourers, refugee children, migrant worker children, stateless children, children with disabilities, children in conflict situations and victims of violence, will persist unless the region address the root causes and consequences comprehensively. What is the state of child rights protection in the Asean region? While the region has generally performed well in regard to survival and development, such as in regard to access to primary school, there remain major impediments when it comes to children suffering from social exclusion.

There are three levels of action at stake: Asean's own response to child rights (such as compliance by Asean officials and bodies); Asean's support for the protection of child rights by each member country; and protection of child rights by each Asean country, irrespective of action from Asean as an organisation.

These entry points are tested by the fact that all 10 Asean countries are parties to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and some of their Protocols which need effective implementation through child responsive laws, policies and practices, with adequate resource commitment, monitoring and capacity building.

Asean refers to this convention on children's rights and protection in its various documents and blueprints, most recently in its the "Forging Ahead Together" drive from 2015 to 2025, and this helps validate the CRC at the regional, national and local levels. There is additional impetus today from the globally agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2015 till 2030.

There is a degree of institutionalisation of child rights in the region in the sense that there are both regional and national institutions dealing with child development and child protection.

At the regional level, there is the Asean Commission on the Rights of Women and Children, complementing the more general mandate of the Asean Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights. However, both are weakened by the fact that they do not respond to complaints of child rights violations. They are, however, more involved with the promotion of activities such as conferences and research papers rather than protection activities to provide redress and to call for the accountability of wrongdoers.

On the programmatic front, there are now various Asean-backed programmes which support national capacity to protect children and they can be further strengthened. One of the earliest was an Asean programme on early childhood and the related training of national officials to respond to a child's right to survival and development.

Today there are Asean-backed policies and programmes in regard to violence against children which parallel SDG No 16 in calling for inclusive societies, action against violence concerning children, and rights and freedoms. There is also now a periodic youth debate on human rights in Asean.

One angle reflected in programming supported by Asean is to promote better communication skills in dealing with children and to use positive discipline measures, such as enabling children to improve themselves through servicing the community, rather than by using violent measures. Yet, the irony is that in most Asean countries, corporal punishment is still legal and practised, even though the United Nations' CRC Committee has called for an end to such punishment both in public institutions and family situations. The issue of data will be important in the next phase, particularly to overcome violence and discrimination. For instance, at the national level, data will have to be collected under SDG No 5 on gender equality and the end to violence concerning women and girls. Statistics will have to come from ingenious methods, when faced with sensitive issues such as female genital mutilation and early or forced marriage.

It is imperative for national government bodies, Asean and international agencies, such as Unicef, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), and the International Labour Organisation, to promote understanding and ensure complementarity between data collected under the various SDGs.

There is a key overlap or convergence between the SDG No 5 and No 8 (which deals with labour issues) and No 16, for example, as they all cover aspects of violence in regard to children, including girls and child trafficking victims, to a lesser or greater extent. Nor is such data to be seen as static. It has to be used well to mobilise action and resources to prevent violations, to provide physical and legal protection, and to offer justice, redress and recovery.

In some situations which are not well encompassed by Asean, such as regional migration, bilateral and sub-regional perspectives come into play, particularly bilateral memoranda of understanding (MOUs) between Asean countries, such as on migrant labour and human trafficking.

Although there is an Asean Declaration on the Rights of Migrant Workers and a new Asean convention against human trafficking, the bilateral and sub-regional management and regulation of such migration remain challenging and need to be child-friendly and responsive. The classic case is the situation of children of migrant workers who, under the current range of bilateral MOUs, need to be protected and cared for when their parents cross borders to undertake work.

There also is a need to shun the advocacy of particularities such as "Asean values" which place more emphasis on economic rights than political rights and on governmental and collective rule than individual aspirations. Respect for the totality of child rights, including children's rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, provides the groundwork for inclusive societies as voiced by SDG No 16. The preferred value of Asean is thus to open up the space for democratic governance from a young age and foster child participation, with cross-cultural fertilisation, for this is and will be the rejuvenating elixir for Asean as a whole.