A Cultural Bridge, Not an Imposition: Legitimizing Children’s Rights in the Eyes of Local Communities

The Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly on 20th November 1989, is the world’s most rapidly and widely ratified international convention. Adopted partly in an attempt to set international norms and establish a universal standard for the concepts of childhood and child, the Convention promotes a particular nature of childhood for children everywhere and seeks to set a universal approach for protecting all children around the world.¹ Although it was hoped that the Convention would have an enormously positive impact on the lives of all children, this has not happened in many parts of the world. In fact, to date, no country has fully realized its provisions. According to Michael Freeman, “much of the world has as much chance of implementing the Convention as sending its citizens to the moon. Unfortunately, most countries would also rather do the latter.”²

While lack of political will, awareness, and resources are certainly critical in analyzing the obstacles confronting the Convention, the cultural bias inherent both in its drafting and content has led many to question its relevance to non-Western communities and is central to understanding its limited implementation. Explaining the dynamics of the debate requires an in-depth analysis of the universality and relativity dichotomy, which has underpinned the debate on children’s rights and human rights for centuries. This analysis will help us to begin searching for a common ground, a compromise that will take into account the reality on the ground and enable us to develop strategies that are more contextually appropriate.

This article aims to explore the ways we can move beyond the universality/ relativity debate in order to make the Convention applicable and relevant to local communities. To put it another way, this article will explore the ways in which the Convention can be legitimized in the eyes of local communities. First, I will outline and critique the key tenets of both sides of the universality and relativity dichotomy. Second, I will explore how we can bridge the universality-relativity divide and realize that both sides of the debate are critical for the protection and development of children in our increasingly globalized world. I will consider the significance of the cultural relativity of rights for children’s rights framework and how far down the line of relativism can we travel while millions of children around the world are being exploited.

Outlining the Universality Position on Children’s Rights

Putting Forward the Case for Universality

The many supporters of the Convention argue that its universal nature is reflected by the fact that it has been ratified by 192 countries, making it the most widely ratified Convention in the history of the United Nations, and thus, the most universal—on paper at least. It is also the most rapidly ratified international treaty. The Convention was open for signature on 26th January 1990 and by the end of that year, sixty-two states had ratified it. According to Sarah Muscroft, a third of countries ratified the Convention in 1990, over one-fifth the following year, and nearly nine-tenths within five years of its adoption by the General Assembly.³ This leads her to conclude that “compared with other human rights treaties, this is a remarkable feat and reflects a profound common desire to achieve a better world for children.”⁴ Furthermore, for many countries, the Convention was the first international human rights treaty that they had signed. Therefore, for Muscroft:

It is now possible to talk of a common ethical and legal framework relating to children that is virtually universally accepted . . . it cannot easily be argued that the Convention is a ‘Western’ view of human rights of children, incompatible with, say, Asian or African views.⁵

The almost universal ratification of the Convention and other human rights instruments has also led Rhoda Howard to conclude that although not universal in origin, human rights are now, in principle, universally applicable because of the social evolution of the entire world towards state societies.⁶ Abdullahi An-Na...