APRIL 16 – WORLD DAY AGAINST CHILD SLAVERY.
30th ANNIVERSARY OF THE MURDER OF IQBAL MASIH, MARTYR OF THE FIGHT AGAINST CHILD SLAVERY.
This should be the cry of a society that loves the weak and seeks to eradicate the suffering and atrocity endured by 400 million enslaved children.
But what are International Organizations, Agencies, Political Parties, Trade Unions, NGOs really doing to put an end to this tragedy, to ensure that the rights of these children are respected, and to guarantee that study and play are their only “forms of work”? The date set by the famous Agenda 2030 for the total eradication of «child labor» is 2025. A complete lie.
In 1959, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Later, in 1989, the UN adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which also outlined the responsibilities of governments and created a Committee on the Rights of the Child made up of 18 experts to monitor progress on the issue. But what seemed like a new step forward only served to issue non-binding recommendations.
One article of the Convention on the Rights of the Child says: “States Parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.”
Despite all these advances on paper, the numbers and the cruelty against children continue to rise. We see children being subjected to sexual exploitation, working on vast plantations, in factories, in domestic labor, in mines, on the streets, in garbage dumps, in criminal activities, recruited into armed conflicts as soldiers, dragged into criminal gangs or terrorism, trafficked for adoption or for their organs, and so on and so forth. All of this happens with the complicity, whether through action or omission, of International Organizations, of Agencies with their Agendas and their useless, ineffective protocols.
One of the mechanisms of this complicity is language. A euphemistic and cynical language that refers to children trapped in this machinery of exploitation as “child workers.” A way, as Hannah Arendt would say, of normalizing evil.
Indeed, in 1999, at its 87th session, the International Labour Conference adopted the ILO Convention aimed at eliminating what it called “the worst forms of child labor.” Later, the ILO included Target 8.7 in the Sustainable Development Goals, within the 2030 Agenda, with the commitment to “end child labor in all its forms by 2025.”
But what exactly do they mean by “the worst forms of child labor”? The ILO, on its official website, defines them as: 1. All forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, forced or compulsory labor, debt bondage, and serfdom. 2. The use, recruitment, or offering of a child for prostitution, the production of pornography or pornographic performances. 3. The use, recruitment, or offering of a child for illicit activities, particularly the production and trafficking of drugs. 4. Any work which, by its nature or the conditions in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety, or morals of children.
We agree, but we must ask: why are the children in the first category not referred to as what they really are — child slaves — if they fall under “forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery”? Why aren’t the “jobs” listed in the second, third, and fourth categories also considered forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery? What else can prostitution, forced recruitment, involvement in criminal gangs, so-called “child domestic service” be called? What is the intention behind this language? To lessen its impact on society? To preserve a sugar-coated rhetoric that does not challenge our consumerist, hedonistic, or indifferent way of life? Or perhaps, more likely, to avoid interfering with a very profitable business?
Because this situation of exploitation is nothing short of a war against childhood, and all wars exist because they are profitable, a big business. And the casualties in this war are child slaves. Why else would the real figures be hidden? In 1999, the ILO reported 50 to 60 million “child workers.” Today, 25 years later, it states there are 160 million. But recent studies from the University of Zurich suggest that the actual number could be closer to 400 million, as the Christian Cultural Movement has been denouncing for years. So where is the goal of eliminating what they euphemistically call “child labor” by 2025?
We denounce the existence of 400 million child slaves. And we have been doing so since April 16, 1995, the day a child slave named Iqbal Masih was murdered for speaking out about this tragedy. Thirty years after his assassination, we aim to ensure his death was not in vain, and to keep shouting and demanding in the streets that this society never allows there to be not a single child slave.
Iqbal Masih was born in Pakistan. He was four years old when his father sold him to a carpet factory in Punjab. To pay off the debt, Iqbal worked as a child slave, twelve hours a day, weaving carpets for one rupee a day.
At the age of 10, Iqbal attended a rally on human rights, and his life changed radically. He managed to gain his freedom through a campaign by the Bonded Labour Liberation Front and became an active fighter against child slavery.
In April 1995, on Easter Sunday, when he was 12 years old, Iqbal was shot dead near Lahore. The carpet industry was accused of being behind the crime.
In 1997, the Christian Cultural Movement launched its campaign against Child Slavery and promoted the proposal for April 16 to become the International Day Against Child Slavery.
