Thirty years ago, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Convention) to provide vital legal protections to children around the world. The Convention provides safeguards to protect children from human rights abuses such as trafficking, violence, and persecution. The Convention also establishes children’s rights to freedom, to education, and to their own identity.  The November 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Convention is celebrated around the world as the Universal Children’s Day.

Today, the United States is the only country that has failed to ratify the Convention. And the result is playing out before our eyes. At Article 3, the Convention requires all governments and private actors to make the best interests of children a primary consideration in all decisions. Considering a child’s best interests—including her right to be safe, to be with her family—would have prevented the separation of immigrant children from parents for months so that their parents could be prosecuted for crossing our border to ask for help. It would have prevented the deportation of parents before they were reunified with their children. It would prevent the government from turning away children at the border who express a fear of persecution in their home countries. And it would have prevented holding children for days and weeks in horrific conditions at the border, where the government’s own watchdog agency confirmed that children experienced a lack of beds, blankets and space to lay down, a lack of privacy from unrelated adults, and unhygienic spaces.

The Importance of the Convention for the Young Center’s Independent Child Advocates

Young Center Child Advocates are champions for the rights and best interests of children who arrive in the United States on their own, from all corners of the world. We also fight on behalf of children forcibly separated from their families at our border. Our role is to develop and submit recommendations to judges, government officials, and immigration authorities about the best interests of each child. Our recommendations—which may address why a child should be released from government custody to a family member, or reunified with a parent, or granted protection from deportation—stem from federal law, domestic child welfare law, and also from the Convention.

We base our recommendations on the specific facts of each child’s case, applying the widely recognized best interests principles enshrined in the Convention: the child’s expressed wishes and the child’s right to safety, liberty, family integrity, development, and to express his or her wishes and his or her own identity. Relying on these principles, we have helped to secure children’s release from custody, their reunification with parents and family members, access to services to address histories of trauma, and the right to remain permanently in the United States or to safely repatriate to their home countries.

Relying on the Convention to Advance Fundamental Policy Reform

From its inception, the Young Center has advocated for the creation of a child-appropriate immigration system that protects the rights of immigrant children—rights clearly outlined in the Convention. We staffed a multi-year endeavor of the federal Interagency Working Group on Unaccompanied and Separated Children, which in 2016 released the Framework for Considering the Best Interests of Unaccompanied Children. The Framework recommends changes in the policies and practices of every federal agency working with unaccompanied children to ensure that children’s best interests are considered in every decision.  

U.S. Relationship with the Convention

The U.S. played an essential role in the drafting of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. But despite its active participation in creating the human rights principles set forth in the Convention, the U.S. is now the only country in the world that has failed to ratify it. One argument against ratification includes the fear of losing control over our own laws; however, this claim is unfounded. Sovereign nations ratify treaties in order to uphold standards they value and are free to make reservations limiting the treaty’s application. Every other nation in the world has found mechanisms to ratify the Convention while protecting their own national interests.

Because the U.S. is not a party to the Convention, it is unable to sit on the Committee of the Rights of the Child, which monitors the human rights conditions of children around the world. Without ratification, the United States fails, time and time again, to protect children within its own borders and cannot be considered an international leader in the field of human rights.

Our work at the Young Center has proven the essential role the Convention can play in making sure children are safe. It is time for the United States to ratify the Convention, which will advance our domestic and international policies to protect and promote the health, safety, and well-being of children.