There is an ongoing effort in Ireland to get the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) incorporated into Irish national legislation. To that end, a series of meetings has been organised in the Irish parliament, and representatives from countries where the CRC has already been incorporated into domestic law (Scotland and Sweden) have been invited to explain to Irish lawmakers what it would involve and why it’s a good idea.
Last week, three NGOs held a conference to discuss the initiative; this time it was an invitation-only event sent out to a particular mailing list. This format — conference by email invitation only — seems to be an ever-more popular way for organisations to evade public scrutiny while pretending not to evade public scrutiny. The event did not appear on any of the websites or social media accounts of any of the organisers.
This tracks with other secretive NGO tendencies in our fraught political times: putting sensitive advocacy and communications materials behind members-only login wall, publishing almost nothing on public websites (or at least none of the controversial stuff), deleting social media accounts, cultivating very exclusive mailing lists, and only posting on LinkedIn where civil society professionals think nobody is paying attention except themselves.
It’s very complicated manufacturing consensus for your unpopular elite nonsense these days! But it’s not impossible to find out what they’re up to.
Anyway, Sandra Adams found out that there would be one of these special public-but-not-public meetings about the UN CRC and its incorporation into Irish law last week, so she signed up and went along.
The title of the conference left no room for ambiguity: “Standing up to Anti-Child Rights Movements”. Whatever the organisers have decided is a child’s right, you should be for it, and if you’re not — well they’ve got a mean name for you. There will be no discussion.
The term “anti-child-rights” is being popularised at the EU level by a Brussels-based NGO called Eurochild, (one of the co-organisers of the Dublin event last week) who used it in a 2022 report. It seems to have been inspired by Hungary and Poland vetoing an EU initiative on the rights of the child in 2021 (they rejected the initiative because it contained genderfaff).
Being anti-child-rights seems to involve having a non-extreme, non-woke opinion on all the hot-button issues: abortion, contraception, LGBTIQ+, gender identity ideology, gay men adopting babies, sexuality education in schools, disinformation, and even your opinion on immigration. Honestly it just seems like all the usual elite lib causes with a thick layer of “child rights” speak daubed on top of it.
That’s Eurochild, and they seem nuts as per. But the thing you need to know about the UN CRC is that the original text is not bad in and of itself. However, down through the years there have been various upgrades and addenda tacked onto it thanks to lobbying by various activists and in response to events and societal shifts.
And General comment number 20, which was added in 2015/2016, is all about that gendershite.
If the CRC and General comment number 20 are called into service in judicial decisions in Ireland, it might mean that a fight over puberty blockers will no longer be between a child and their parents and doctor; a judge could decide that the evolving capacities of an adolescent, their right to health, or their right to identity has been breached.
I had a chat with Sandra about it all. It’s a moving story; I just read that another committee meeting will take place next week, so I’ll be updating with any new developments.
Enjoy.
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