Nearly one-fifth of children in the European Union are living in poverty, a new report has concluded.
By David Cronin
Yet despite such widespread hardship in one of the most economically advanced parts of the world, the rights of children go largely unrecognised by the EU. Although the Union’s treaties, which guide all its law-making activities, contain legal clauses on the protection of animals, they lack any comparable provisions relating to children.
Written for members of the European Parliament (MEPs) by Roberta Angelilli, an Italian centre-right MEP, the report suggests that the legal situation should improve once the Treaty of Lisbon, signed by EU leaders last month, comes into effect as it would oblige the Union’s governments to uphold children’s rights. But it indicates that such an improvement will have to be consolidated by concerted action on the situation facing children both within the EU and internationally.
It recommends that EU governments should set themselves an objective of ensuring that there is no homelessness among children, that a database be set up on offences against children so that convicted paedophiles will not be able to move from their home country and work in another, and that tougher penalties be introduced for the sexual abuse of minors. The report also highlights that 5 percent of all asylum-seekers entering the EU are children unaccompanied by adults. No child asylum-seeker should be detained, it says.
Controversially, it advocates a Union-wide ban on the wearing of Islamic headscarves, at least in primary school, “in order to anchor more firmly the right to be a child and to ensure genuine and un-enforced freedom of choice at a later stage.”
And it urges the European Commission to introduce new rules allowing victims of child labour in developing countries to sue any European firms that use under-age workers.
Angelilli told the European Parliament Tuesday that children comprise some 30 percent of the EU’s 492 million citizens. Her aim, she added, was to “look at the affirmation of positive rights to family and health and education, to amusement, to a clean and protected environment.”
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