Roma Rights 3, 2000: Rights of the Child

03 October 2000

The classical human rights doctrine posits that every human being, born free and equal in dignity and rights, endowed with a free will, is capacitated to make free choices. The free will is a transparent, self-reflective agency, expressing the individual’s interest. The individual subject, a bearer of rights, is in principle an indivisible and autonomous entity, interacting only with other, equally free subjects of rights. Thus, the classical human rights paradigm leaves out of consideration the whole process of “becoming” a conscious bearer of rights. Its point of departure is the terminal point at which the process of achieving rights capacity is already accomplished. As to women, children, and the various categories of incompetent persons, their “personhood” is deemed incomplete, their rights and capacity to choose rationally - restricted. They are in need of custody - by fathers, husbands, parents, guardians, doctors, and other mature subjects.

• Displaced childhoods (Dimitrina Petrova)

• Bosnia and Herzegovina * Bulgaria * Czech Republic * France * Greece * Hungary * Italy * Kosovo * Poland * Romania * Slovakia * Slovenia * United Kingdom * Yugoslavia 

• Roma Rights of the Child 

• Realising the child's right to participate (Federica Donati, Michelle Lloyd and David Simpson) 

• Parallel worlds: Romani and non-Romani schools in Bulgaria (Jennifer Tanaka) 

• Framework for a program for equal integration of Roma in Bulgarian society (Council of Ministers of the Bulgarian Government) 

• Romani children and the right to education in Central and Eastern Europe (Angéla Kóczé) 

• Roma and Sinti voices on the right to education in France (Daniella Mercier) 

• Stealing children: institutionalising Romani children in Italy (Kathryn D. Carlisle)  

• I cannot begin to tell you how I felt: the testimony of a Romani mother whose children were removed from her care in Hungary

• UN special session on children: September 2001 (Marty Rajandran)

• UN Race Discrimination Committee holds thematic discussion and issues general recommendation on Roma (Veronika Leila Szente)

• Unprotected: attacks continue against Kosovo's Romani minorities (Emily Shaw)

• Testing to prove racial discrimination: methodology and application in Hungary (Fitsum Alemu)  

• My Central European family (Éva Orsós) 

• Konvencija pala e čhavrikane čačipena: Convention on the Rights of the Child 

• Chronicle