State Dept. NGO Roundtable

On Thursday, I went to the State Dept. to hear a group of people from important government acronyms tell a group of NGO people how they were preparing for their hearing in Geneva at the end of May on the two protocols the US is party to under the mother-treaty of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (which we join Somolia in not being-party-to).

The US will send an inter-agency delegation (from Depts of Defense, Justice, State, Health & Human Services, Homeland Security, and possibly the National Security Council) to report on our progress since we're signatories to the Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, and on the Optional Protocol against Children in Armed Conflict.

There were about 35-40 people in the conference room, and many were representing these power-packed gov't acronyms. Ambassador Mark Logan, from the State Dept.'s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, moderated the meeting. He said something illuminating as he reflected on our (US) role in reporting: [possibly paraphrased] "If we're asking other nations to be transparent in their human rights work, we must do so as well as an exemplar." If only...

The State Dept. people outlined the structure of the Geneva hearing, and then opened the floor to anyone who would want to ask questions/comment on procedure or content matter. I was gearing up to ask a question about Gitmo, but someone from Human Rights Watch covered the ground in a helpful 3-point concern list. She raised the provision under the Protocol about Children in Armed Conflict about underaged deployment - and wondered about the accountability of DOD to catch possible slip-in recruits who weren't yet 18; she brought up the Detention policy and practice we have for underaged prisoners, and specified the case of Omar Khadr, a detainee captured a few years before he turned 18 and yet held at Gitmo with no apparent regard for the obligation under the protocol for rehabilitation and reintegration of child soldiers; and she brought up the former child soldiers who have entered the US looking for asylum, and the amount of times they are not granted asylum because of the 'persecutor bar' that disregards their age as well.

The facilitators did not comment more than a polite nod and 'thanks' for the concern raised. There was an assertion by the facilitators that sometimes the Committee reviewing the US can make recommendations that the US doesn't agree with, and sometimes those recommendations are just suggestions - not really binding or part of something we have to change. *sigh*. They say they're open to dialogue, but it seems only in as much as the dialogue proves that we're doing fine and don't have to change.

A young African American man brought an interesting perspective to the group of mainly-white-overly-satisfied-with-their-good-work people. He was from Chicago and represented some coalition and brought up numerous points: about the gentrification in his city, he said gang territories were affected by the shifts and what would the Committee say about the armed conflict going on with US borders? Later he talked about the recruitment policies for youth in high schools, and still later, he brought up the prison system, how 17 year olds could be placed in federal prisons with adults and could be/often are subject to sexual exploitation. He told the group he was 20 years old and had been nominated to come to the meeting from his coalition in Chicago. The squirm-factor was high, and the bobbing and weaving was pretty impressive by the facilitators.

Thankfully, other NGO people affirmed this guy's points by validating his concerns with similar ones of their own. Were there oversight measures for unlawful recruitment policies by the armed forces? Were there investigations into why lower income and/or immigrant communities often had higher recruitment officers than other communities? What about the criminalization of children under 18 who are caught in prostitution? What about the ridiculous ease and availability of small arms for minors in our country?

There may be a follow-up meeting after the Geneva hearing. The facilitators also said they would make their answers to the Committee's pre-hearing questions available to us (around the table) when they were completed.