Czech Republic not addressing children's rights

Yesterday the Czech state delegation led by Czech Government Human Rights Commissioner Michaela Šimůnková answered questions from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva regarding insufficient fulfillment of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Committee expressed concern that the Czech Republic is repeatedly ignoring its previous recommendations. The main criticisms concern the lack of a National Action Plan for upholding children’s rights, the absence of a body responsible for fulfillment of the Convention, ongoing segregation in the schools, and a high proportion of children being raised in institutional care.

The Committee for the Rights of the Child, comprised of 18 experts on children’s issues, is an expert body monitoring the upholding of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. States that have ratified the Convention are obliged to regularly report to the Committee on the state of children’s rights in their country. The last session of the Committee at which the situation in the Czech Republic was reviewed was in September 2003. At that session the Committee made more than 30 recommendations to the country, most of which remain unfulfilled today.

At the Committee’s 57th session yesterday, the delegation from the Czech Republic answered more than 100 questions about how the Convention is being upheld. At the very beginning, the Committee was unpleasantly surprised to learn there is still no permanent body in the Czech Republic coordinating the performance of the Convention statewide. There is also no comprehensive National Action Plan to bring all of the principles and regulations of the Convention to life.

“You have presented many national-level sectoral policies, but these policies only concern narrowly-defined areas. We are concerned that these policies are coordinated with one another or linked and that they do not cover all of the children’s rights anchored in the Convention,” said Jean Zermatten, chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Another unpleasant discovery was the fact that the Czech Republic also does not have an independent body to monitor the upholding of the Convention and to investigate individual children’s complaints. In the past the Committee has recommended expanding the mandate of the ombudsman or establishing an independent ombudsman for children.

Many questions were dedicated to the issue of persisting segregation in education. The Czech NGO League of Human Rights (Liga lidských práv) drew attention to this problem in its shadow report presented to the Committee at a meeting in February.

“We very often encounter Roma children being enrolled into ‘special schools’ on the basis of evaluations from the educational-psychological counseling centers, which classify them as children suffering from light brain dysfunction. The Committee noticed that the vast majority of the children so labeled are Roma,” says Michaela Tetřevová, a lawyer with the League who personally attended the session in Geneva.

When the Committee asked how the state intends to prevent this practice, the Czech delegation said the staffs of the educational-psychological counseling centers will undergo training. The League believes such training in and of itself cannot be a sufficient guarantee that the practice of segregation will be eliminated and is convinced that deeper changes to the school system must be made. Roma children are not the only ones excluded from mainstream education. Disabled children or those whose parents are foreigners are also excluded.

Members of the Committee were also interested in the issue of the high number of children in institutional care in the Czech Republic. They were disturbed in particular by the fact that the number of children placed in institutions annually has not declined.

The state delegation also had to answer unpleasant questions about the insufficient number of persons working in the field of the legal and social protection of children. Social workers should provide preventive care to families in order to forestall problems that might lead to the child being taken away from the family and institutionalized. The Committee will publish its concluding recommendations for the Czech Republic on 17 June 2011.