Present commitment

The question facing us today is to recognise the paths along which this spirituality which we share is leading us. If opening schools by the first communities of Brothers can be seen as putting into practice the special concern for the poor, we must find an up-to-date means of putting our commitment to the service of the poor through education into practice.

This is when the idea of human rights and especially rights of children becomes visible. With the onset of the industrial society, the idea of right appeared little by little and asserted itself. The declaration of human and civil rights in 1789 followed by the drawing up of Laws as well as the declaration of great Public Freedoms at the end of the XIXth century are so many stages which marked the movement of codification of rights and duties  in France. The peak of this movement was reached in 1948, with the creation of the UNO and the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first list of human rights with universal appeal. This Declaration includes in particular, an article 28, which states that all people have a right to social and international order so that the present rights and freedoms can be applied.

The contents of the commitment would gradually become precise: civil and political rights, economic, social and cultural rights, collective rights. From the universal the commitment would be extended to the regional level. It would take on more precise forms, better adapted to the regional political cultures. Then, certain subjects would change to more specialised commitments: fight against discrimination, fight against torture, etc. Lastly, certain classes of people would gradually benefit from a special protection, regarding their situation as potential victims: workers, victims of armed conflict, women, and what concerns us, children. In 1989, the United Nations proclaimed a Convention for the rights of the child. This was greeted at the time as a major advance in human rights. This text is the culmination of long preparatory work, in which the BICE (Bureau International Catholique de l’Enfance) played an important part (cf. infra). It bears witness to the evolution of the image of the child in society. In fact, “if the child as a weak human being to be protected as bequeathed to us by the XIXth century is very present there, the Convention shapes a completely different image of the child, that of the future citizen, placed at the heart of a system of rights and responsibilities, of practical citizens who foreshadow their adult life”.

The Convention had been preceded by a first Declaration with five points (1924) entitled “Declaration of Geneva”, then by a second Declaration with ten points in 1959, in which the wording of a scarcely juridical right appeared, but which is very close to Lasallian spirituality touched on above: the right to love. We can now pause a while to call to mind the general dynamic of this Convention which allowed the international right of the child to pass from a declaratory statute to a binding one.

The Convention on the rights of the child contains 54 articles and it is  intended to promote a truly legal statute of the child, itself promoted to the level of subject of rights. The Convention affirms the basic principles, among them being the right of the child to a family, or the necessary taking into account of the higher interest of the child. We will come back later to these two principles around which we can develop our proposals for new work. Beyond these principles the Convention contains measures which bring a change of perspective. The need for protection is no longer at the heart of the plan, even though a certain number of rights in social, cultural, economic and penal matters refer to it. The most salient innovations concern the measures relating to fundamental freedoms: the child is recognised as having rights of opinion, expression, thought and association.

The text, it is agreed, breaks new ground by foreseeing a system of control of application. Article 43 of the Convention sets up a Committee of the rights of the child, charged with examining the reports of States with regard to the measures of application taken in the law of the country. These reports are examined and discussed by a group of ten independent experts. The NGOs, with a consultative statute under the United Nations, have the responsibility of producing alternative reports, which “complete” (not to say contradict) state reports which are often too flattering. This is the case with BICE for example. Taking into account the importance given to participation of the NGOs at the heart of the Committee of the Rights of the child in Geneva, the question of a specific presence of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, who represent almost a million young people in the world, becomes very pertinent.