Tempers frayed after Geneva child protection talks

  • 2001-01-18
  • Nick Coleman
RIGA - Children's rights campaigners have strongly criticized government officials who, they say, misled a United Nations inquiry into protection of children's rights in Latvia.

The accusations have been rejected by the head of the National Children's Rights Protection Center. The row points to the need for more information about the state of Latvian children, said the director of the United Nations Children's Fund in Latvia.

The U.N.'s Committee on the Rights of the Child has been meeting in Geneva this month to discuss reports from a number of countries, including Latvia and Lithuania. The criticisms came from the charity Save the Children, which has recently been a focus of media attention after alleging serious abuses committed at a residential school in a remote corner of southeastern Latvia, claims which are now under investigation.

Anita Rektina, a legal adviser to Save the Children, who observed the meeting on Jan. 9, said Latvian government representatives painted an overly rosy picture of the state of Latvian children. She said Save the Children had collected data on the eviction of 3,000 people from properties in the coastal region of Jurmala in 1998, many of whom were children. Such evictions contradict international laws which say that children must not be made homeless due to the failings of their parents, she said. Poverty levels in Latvia are far more severe than the state's figure of 20 percent living below the poverty line would suggest, she added.

"What happens on paper is one thing," said Rektina. "What happens in real life is quite another. Where the government couldn't put the situation in a good light they tried not to answer questions which were uncomfortable."

The state's responses to questions on the length of time minors spend in pretrial detention were also inadequate, said Rektina. Representatives falsely claimed that there had only been 17 violations of time limits for pre-trial detention, she said. Such dishonesty would endanger Latvia's chances of receiving international aid to improve protection of children's rights, she said.

Inete Ielite, director of the National Children's Rights Protection Center, rejected Save the Children's criticisms of the state's performance at the inquiry.

"We had a very good dialogue and the committee gave us an understanding of what we should pay most attention to," she said. "We are not trying to hide anything."

Priority areas identified at the meeting were health, child mortality rates, prevention of drug abuse and prevention of the spread of HIV infection, said Ielite.

"We admitted the problem of the length of pre-trial detention, a problem we've started to tackle. I look forward to cooperating with the prison authorities on this."

Latvian law follows the letter and spirit of the International Convention on Protection of Children's Rights, said Ielite. Problems over its application must be solved by training judges, she said. Eviction of children is a problem to be solved at the municipal level, she said.

"Some local governments understand that it costs more to keep children in children's homes and later provide them with apartments than it costs to support families. We need to work together to find solutions," she said.

Ilze Doskina, executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund in Latvia, defended the state's conduct at the meeting, but said the dispute derives from a lack of information.

"The state tried to answer honestly according to the statistics. But we have insufficient data, for example on how many children are evicted and sexually abused," she said. "Some information is not covered by Latvia's Central Statistics Bureau. The statistics reflect the truth but need to be much more detailed on the position on children's rights."

Research methods are also inadequate, said Doskina.

"I've used data from the Ministry of Welfare and the United Nations Development Program which is shocking, suggesting that 95 percent of families with three or more children live below the poverty line, but there are so many different kinds of research it's difficult to say."

The committee is due to deliver its conclusions on Jan. 26.