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Children's Rights Are Human Rights: Or Are
They?
The Hurdles Facing Child Soldiers and Undocumented
Children
May 5, 2008
Time: 6:00 - 8:00pm
Speaker: Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy;
Under-Secretary-General,
Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and
Armed Conflict
Location: Harvard-Yenching Auditorium
2 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge, MA
Public Conversation with: Susannah Sirkin,
Physicians for Human Rights and Anne Gillespie, The Medical-Legal
Partnership for Children, Boston Medical Center
Moderated by: Jacqueline Bhabha; Director,
University Committee on Human Rights Studies and Andrea Rossi;
Director, Measurement and Human Rights Program, Carr Center for
Human Rights Policy
Sponsored by: The University Committee on Human
Rights Studies, the Measurement and Human Rights Program at the
Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the
Swiss Foreign Ministry, Swiss Consulate, Boston and the Karl Popper
Foundation, Zug-Switzerland.
For more information, please visit
www.humanrights.harvard.edu.
60 years on from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
children's rights are still in their infancy. Hundreds of thousands
of children are recruited as child soldiers, millions live as
undocumented migrants without citizenship, and one third of the
world's children do not have their birth registered, and therefore
do not exist as a matter of law. What are the implications of these
dramatic rights violations and what can be done about them? Leading
experts, including the UN official responsible for child soldiers,
and a prominent advocate engaged with children disappeared during
the civil wars in Latin America, debate the issues. The issue is
not simply an international problem, it is a local challenge - case
studies involving children from the Boston area will form part of
the discussion.