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Children without a State: A Human Rights Challenge
Birth Registration and Irregular Migration
Pre-event dinner: Sunday, May 4, 2008 (Swiss Residence, Lexington, MA) A dinner was held the night before the conference to give the participants the chance to meet. The dinner was organized by the Swiss Consulate. A chartered bus took participants from the Sheraton Commander to the Swiss residence and back to the hotel.
Conference: Monday, May 5, 2008
(Gutman Conference Center, Harvard, Cambridge, MA) Breakfast (8:30 am – 9:00 am)
Welcome (9:00 am – 9:15 am)
Jacqueline Bhabha, Director, University Committee on Human Rights Studies
Emil Wyss, Deputy Consul of Switzerland
Andrea Rossi, Director, Measurement and Human Rights Program, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Session 1: (9:15 am – 11:00 am)
Framing the Problem: The role of documentation and registration in protecting the rights of the child. Chair: Fernando Reimers, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Discussant: Linda Kerber, University of Iowa Presenters:
Saudamini Siegrist, UNICEF, Innocenti Research Center, Italy
Kenneth Hill, Harvard School of Public Health
Laura van Waas, Tilburg University, Netherlands
Caroline Vandenabeele, Asian Development Bank Session 2: (11:15 am – 1:15 pm)
Exploring the Evidence: A presentation of available research on the scale of non registration or undocumented status among children and on the impact of this lack of documentation on children’s access to rights in different geographical locations. Chair: Gerald Neuman, Harvard Law School
Discussant: Helen Marrow, Harvard University, Department of Sociology Presenters:
Bela Hovy, Migration Section, Population Division, United Nations
Tommaso Bicocchi, Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM), Brussels
Daniel Senovilla Hernandez, University of Poitiers, France
Stephen Legomsky, Washington University, St. Louis Law, US
David Thronson, Boyd School of Law at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, US
Lunch (1:15 pm – 2:30 pm) Session 3: (2:30 pm – 4:30 pm)
Best Practices and Policy Responses: Models, policies, ideas for addressing the human rights challenges and generating the necessary political will; public/private partnerships, the relative roles of central and local government. Chair: Mary Waters, Harvard University, Department of Sociology
Discussant: Elizabeth Bartholet, Harvard Law School, Child Advocacy Program Presenters:
Kirsten Di Martino, UNICEF representative to China
Jyothi Kanics, Irish Refugee Council, Ireland
Susan Martin, Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM), Georgetown University, US
Christopher Nugent, Holland and Knight LLP, US
Afternoon Tea Break (4:30 pm - 4:45 pm ) Closing (4:45 pm - 5:15 pm)
Jacqueline Bhabha and Andrea Rossi
Public Event
Monday, May 5, 2008
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
(Harvard-Yenching Auditorium, Cambridge, MA) Children's Rights are Human Rights: Or are they?
The hurdles facing Child soldiers and undocumented children Keynote Speaker: Radhika Coomaraswamy, Under-Secretary-General, United Nations
Special Representative to the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict
Roundtable discussion with:
Susannah Sirkin, Physicians for Human Rights
Anne Gillespie, The Medical-Legal Partnership for Children, Boston Medical Center Moderated by Jacqueline Bhabha 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, debated the issues. The issue is not simply an international problem, it is a local challenge - case studies involving children from the Boston area also were presented.
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