(Washington, D.C., C-Fam) The UN human rights committee focused on protecting children’s rights continues to double down in favor of abortion for minors and against parental rights in its forthcoming general comment focused on children’s access to justice. The government of Argentina has spoken out strongly against it.
The Committee on the Rights of the Child is the treaty body monitoring countries’ compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is the UN human rights treaty ratified by the most nations—only the United States has not ratified it. The committee’s general comments indicate how it will interpret the various articles of the treaty in its dialogues with member states.
The new draft comment specifically mentions the lack of “access to safe abortion services for adolescent girls” as a matter that would require “an effective remedy for a child rights violation” where “time is of the essence.”
Argentina issued strong critical remarks, saying that “the draft requires substantial structural revisions.” Specifically, Argentina pointed to its use of “gender” rather than “sex” in several paragraphs and argues that the reference to abortion violates both national sovereignty and parental rights. Also, the draft confuses access to justice, a procedural guarantee, with “a holistic fulfillment of rights.”
Argentina suggests the entire article may be duplicative, as “has already been addressed in nearly half of the Committee on the Rights of the Child’s general comments, including two dedicated ones.” In summary, “[i]n its current form, it exceeds the Committee’s mandate under the Convention and the UN Charter, violating the principle of good faith in treaty interpretation.”
The Committee on the Rights of the Child’s overreach, particularly on the issue of abortion, has been ongoing for decades. It began urging countries to liberalize their abortion laws in the late 1990s….
Read the entire article at C-Fam.
Editor’s Note: Rebecca Oas, Ph.D. writes for C-Fam. This article first appeared in the Friday Fax, an internet report published weekly by C-Fam (Center for Family & Human Rights), a New York and Washington DC-based research institute (https://c-fam.org/). This article appears with permission.
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