Pope lists tragedies of children in war and trafficking at a rights summit

ROME — Pope Francis convened a high-level summit Monday to demand that children be protected from war, forced labor, trafficking and exploitation, throwing his moral authority behind a global initiative to uphold children’s fundamental rights despite the Catholic Church’s own poor record in protecting them from sexual abuse.

Queen Rania of Jordan opened the summit, recalling that the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely ratified human rights convention in history but is hardly enforced on an equal plane.

“In theory, the global consensus is clear: every right, for every child,” she told the gathering in the Apostolic Palace. “Yet, so many children around the world are excluded from its promise -– particularly in warzones. Worse yet, people have grown desensitized to their pain.”

She cited a psychological study on Gaza’s most vulnerable children, after more than a year of living through the Israel-Hamas war, that found 96% believed their death was imminent, and half said they wanted to die. “How did we let our humanity come to this?” she asked.

Italian Sen. Liliana Segre, a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, told the gathering that she was denied the right to education when Italy’s fascist-era racial laws went into effect in 1938 and Jewish children were barred from school.

“We were surrounded by an indifference that sometimes is worse than violence,” she said.

Segre has spent her life teaching today’s youth about antisemitism and the need to not look away when injustices occur, and has paid the price. “I am the oldest woman in the world with a police escort and am insulted and threatened, despite not having done anything,” she said.

Francis, for his part, listed the tragic summary of plights facing hundreds of millions of today’s children: conflicts, homelessness, trafficking and compulsory marriage. He also referred to the 150 million stateless or “invisible” children who were not registered at birth or have no documents when they migrate.

“This is an obstacle to their accessing education or health care, yet worse still, since they do not enjoy legal protection, they can easily be abused or sold as slaves,” he said.

He cited Myanmar’s Rohingya children, as well as the undocumented migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexican border. “Those first victims of that exodus of despair and hope made by the thousands of people coming from the South towards the United States of America, and many others,” he said.

Several speakers cited the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, the U.N. treaty ratified by 196 countries which sets out the fundamental rights all children enjoy, including the right to life, nationality, freedom of thought and religion, health and education. It calls for signatories to take all appropriate measures to protect children from harm and to put children’s interests above all else.

The Holy See, a U.N. observer state, ratified the convention in 1990.

In 2014, the committee overseeing its implementation strongly criticized the Holy See for the global sex abuse and cover-up scandal and asked the Vatican to report back on implementing its recommendations by 2017. Countries are frequently late in complying with such recommendations, and the Holy See has yet to submit a new country report.

More recently, a group of U.N. special rapporteurs who monitor specific human rights problems wrote to the Holy See in 2021 expressing concern about “persistent” cases of abuse, cover-up and obstruction by the Catholic Church in interfering with victims’ efforts to pursue justice for their abuse.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.