The Child Rights Convention is the only UN human rights treaty with almost universal ratification – save the USA and Somalia. As the AP reports, representatives in the US House are staging opposition to the possibility of ratification, citing the potential “erosion” of parental rights.

“A child’s ‘right to be heard’ would allow him (or her) to seek governmental review of every parental decision with which the child disagreed”; and “Children would have the ability to choose their own religion while parents would only have the authority to give their children advice about religion,” Representative Hoekstra is said to fear.

The government of the People’s Republic of China has released its National Human Rights Action Plan for 2009-2010. The comprehensive document can be found here, it includes, among others, a chapter on the rights of persons with disabilities as was duly noted by BIZEPS.

Time and again the consequences of female infanticide – the preference for boys leading to sex-selective abortions – are discussed in the media. The latest report comes from China where the combination of the one-child policy mixed with a preference for males has created a gap of 32 million in the generation of under 20-year-olds.

In its latest Report amnesty international Austria discusses the question of structural racism in the Austrian police force and asks: “victim or suspect?” as it documents the frequent correlation of “race” and “police violence.” “Migrants or persons of an ethnic minority are far more easily suspected to have committed a crime than “white” Austrians,” concludes amnesty.

Migranten oder Angehörige ethnischer Minderheiten geraten viel leichter als weiße Österreicher unter Verdacht, Straftaten begangen zu haben. 

The police denies any pattern or other wrongdoing.

The grey-areas of any profession are thorny territory. Some of the greyer questions loom around medical professionals working for police, prisons and the likes. The fact that they are being paid by one side but should be looking after the people on the “other” side regularly raises tricky questions.

 As the NYTimes reports a report by the International Red Cross, which had been kept confidential for quite some time, recounts the experience of several prisoners at ‘Camp Justice’, the Guantánamo Bay prison; concluding that the role of the medical professionals was to “support the interrogators, not protect the prisoners.”