You may, you too, have a child who has just reached his/her 18th birthday : emotions, celebrations, flashbacks, pictures and memories, and then the awareness of what formal and legal changes this brings about for your child. For reaching majority brings in its deal of freedom, but also of responsibility. In other words, your son or daughter is not anymore a beneficiary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, was there ever any such thing as awareness to enjoy this vanishing  “cover” ? It  depends on the child’s opportunities to be informed about it. How many children living in Switzerland have never had a single awareness-raising session on child rights, at whatever level in their curriculum? A tricky question … for a disheartening answer : most of them…

Is this inevitable? No : to take an example in a neighbouring country, in France human rights and children’s rights education is mainstreamed in curricula and educational actions in schools and other facilities. Much of it is due to the action of the children’s Ombudsman whose mission is to promote children’s rights. This authority independent from the State provides online pedagogical  tools. In 2009, about sixty States established a children’s Ombudsman. Children’s Ombudsmen in Europe are federated into a network (European Network of Ombudspersons for Children) gathering 35 members out of 47 Council of Europe member countries. Switzerland belongs to the minority where such an independent authority is not yet to be found. Such a want is hardly excusable for a self-proclaimed rule of law and human rights land. To be up to such an image, we should first make known to those who are born and/or grow up there what those rights are, and what they imply for them and their legal representatives.

And yet, as far as child rights information is concerned, Switzerland is not lacking pedagogical tools. The Foundation Education and Development, e.g., offers interesting material. It gives out about 40’000 learning sheet in French-speaking cantons, relying on 2’000 teachers who choose to order them. Awareness-raising on children’s rights is thus depending on the goodwill of school heads and/or teachers. Switzerland is not conducting systematic education on children’s rights. In other words, despite the availability of teaching material, political will lags behind.

Conversely, very systematic caution is shown by Parliament members, when addressed on this issue : teaching curricula are allegedly incumbent to cantons… With just as many school systems as there are cantons, Swiss pupils are not treated on an equal basis with regard to information on their rights. Even though Harmos has set out, has its name says, to somehow harmonize school structures and curricula, nothing indicates that this reform involves compulsory teaching on children’s rights. The main debate aroused by Harmos is focused on the age of admission to school. This is symptomatic of a larger state of mind accepting that, as late as today, twenty years after the adoption of the CRC, many children go through a whole curriculum without a single lesson on their rights, in other words their statute. This sounds like the mid 1900’s, when sex education was still feared … And it might have been  less feared even than children’s rights are nowadays!...

Speaking about rights, beside duties, can be objectionable only for those persuaded that the statute of pupil prevails over the statute of child. That pupils above everything else owe obedience to the school facility’s rules. It is no scandalous breach into cantonal competence on education to ask that, whatever the canton where the child is enrolled in school, he or she be informed of the existence of the Convention on the Rights of the child, and its meaning on a daily basis. By ratifying the Convention, Switzerland has pledged itself to diffuse it and make it known to children. How to pretend teaching children if their legal statute is unclear and not made knowledgeable? School can and must become a favourite place to think, as a cross-cutting issue, on what it means to be a child, in order to be human before being qualified…

Any comment you may have would be welcome webmaster@childsrights.org.