'children rights' - tagged features

The Swedish government has adopted a new plan of action to fight child sex tourism. The measure has been welcomed by the main non-governmental organisation which highlights the problem. But campaigners feel more needs to be done to come to grips with the problem. 

A few weeks ago a group of French aid workers were arrested in Chad as they attempted to take just over a hundred local children to France. They were members of l’Arche de Zoe, a charity that had been planning to evacuate children from the war-torn Darfur region of western Sudan. The question on many people’s lips is what were these charity workers doing? They’re now under investigation in Chad. They’d spent all summer recruiting French families to be hosts to what they said would be orphans from Darfur. UNICEF has since confirmed that most of the children on the plane to france were not orphans, and most are probably from Chad, not Sudan. 

Almost 20.000 scientists, health care providers, educators, policy makers, community leaders and people living with HIV will be gathering at the XVIth International AIDS conference in Toronto next week. The aim is to share current knowledge on this global epidemic that has already killed more than 25 million people and infected another 40 million around the world. Here in Europe a Human Rights Watch report released last week slammed the Romanian government for failing to integrate more than 7,000 HIV infected children aged 15 to 19 - the largest such group in any European state. The report says the vast and filthy orphanages of the pre-1989 communist regime were a breeding ground for AIDS. And even though most HIV infected Romanians do have access to free anti-retroviral drugs and there are laws to protect them, Romanian society is slow to accept these rights. Ignorance about AIDS remains widespread and so is discrimination, preventing children and teenagers from attending school, getting healthcare or jobs.