Inconvenient rights

have we stopped valuing life or did we never start

99 years ago, the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child was formally adopted by the League of Nations. Written by a coalition of white, left-wing British feminists, and promoted by Save the Children, it was the very first declaration of international civilian rights to be formally adopted by an intergovernmental organisation and - in that way - a forerunner to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights.

The  Declaration argued that children were the first to suffer in war or times of hardship and that they should be the first to receive help. Every Child had a right to care, and to ‘normal development, both psychically and spiritually.’ The declaration was meant to apply to all children ‘regardless of race nationality or creed’. But it betrayed the prejudices of the white feminists who authored it. The value of children wasn’t seen as inherent or innate, but instead was based upon what the child might grow up to give to society. All children had a right to work and training, and - the declaration stated - must be brought up ‘in the consciousness that its talents must be devoted to the service of its fellow men.’¹

In 1937 Nazi bombs razed the Spanish city of Guernica to the ground. Inspired by the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, indomitable aid worker Fritzi Small imagined that protecting children in must now involve moving them away from this new, deadly and indiscriminate aerial bombardment. She relayed messages between generals on both sides, even securing an audience with General Franco, to ensure the mass evacuation of Spanish children. These became a model for the mass evacuations of children across the U.K. during the Blitz, just a few years later.

a child stands before Picasso’s Guernica, a warning against the horror of war fought from the sky

The Declaration of the Rights of the Child inspired new mechanisms for protecting children from war. But as the horrors of fascism unfolded across Europe, child rights did not equally protect all children.

The white feminist authors of the child rights declaration had always been unsure of the position of disabled children (who might not give back to society) and refugee children (who had no national society to give back to). These feminist humanitarians flirted with eugenics to describe what they termed ‘the limits of child rights’. Because children’s value wasn’t inherent or innate, which children fell beyond their limits was for individual states to decide. Jewish Children in occupied Europe - stripped of citizenship - were not imagined by their society to be valuable, so what then?

In 1924, a Save the Children worker first read the declaration of child rights in a refugee camp in Salonika, and saw its deadly omission. Looking out across a sea of tents, it was, he said, ‘impossible’ to see how child rights could work for the stateless, children who were not valued by societies that disowned them. But, away from the refugee camps, the authors of the Child Rights declaration failed to grapple with the inconvenient rights of children who didn’t fit within their vision of the world. Ultimately, they - and the international humanitarian community - looked away from the fate of Jewish children in occupied Europe.

After the United Nations ratified the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, Hannah Arendt raised doubts that echoed those of the refugee relief worker in 1924. The new Human Rights that people were assured of - freedom, privacy, work, family, - could only be upheld by nation states. There was a ‘right to have rights’ that could only be conferred by citizenship. In the seventy-five years since she observed this, humanitarian agencies and the United Nations have tried to plug these gaps - providing education in refugee camps for example - for people who do not have the ‘right to have rights’ conferred by statehood. International Criminal Courts have prosecuted human rights violations, and the European Court of Human Rights provided a mechanism for people to claim human rights they were being denied by their own states, in rare cases. It’s never been enough.

There’s a whole historiographical cottage industry devoted to locating Human Rights in time. The argument goes: Human Rights in 1948 weren’t what we imagine to be human rights today because they were a tool of empire/ the Cold War/ did not apply to the world’s stateless, segregated, or colonised peoples. Then, historians argue about when ‘human rights’ actually existed as a principle organising international law, individual expectations, and collective action. Some now say that the ‘high point’ for Human Rights was actually more than 4 decades after 1948, in the 1990s.

Why am I writing about historiography while children are dying in Palestine? I think it’s because, if there ever was a moment when international society truly valued all lives, we blinked and we missed it. I can’t work out if what is happening now - the absolute disregard for the lives of children - is because we lost something, or because in a world where we talk about humanitarian law and human rights they have never, ever existed for inconvenient people. Did we ever move on from 1924, where British feminists discovered the worth of only worthy children: healthy children, in nation states, with work to do and talents to give.

Every morning I read about the dead in Palestine as a small act of witness. As of October 29th, 3,195 children have been killed in Gaza. I think every day of a five-year-old boy named Iyad, who in the image released by his family was doing the same ‘thumbs up’ photo pose currently favoured by my four-year-old son. Western media reportage often calls on our sympathies for the children who might have been doctors, teachers, lawyers. They focus often on what children could have become. But children - all of us - must simply be. That has to be enough.

Iyad was killed at the Jabalia refugee camp in Northern Gaza

The first group of people who proclaimed the rights of children, who strove to protect children from war, were only interested in children’s becoming. Children were the future, and children whose future they could not envisage were abandoned to their fate. It feels like we’ve learned nothing. Seas are rising, entire communities are being wiped out. In Britain, we have abandoned public health precautions in favour of convenience and leave the old, disabled, and unwell to their fates in a pandemic that is still ongoing. In some of the world’s wealthiest nations, children are starving. More children are living under bombs and blockades than at any time since 1945. Have we ever valued life so little, or did we never truly value it at all?

For all my historiography I still can’t answer this. But what I know is: in a world where only convenient rights matter, none of us are safe.

1. I wrote a book about this and other things relating to children’s rights and humanitarianism from ww1 to the 1970s