Interview:Salil Shetty,

secretary general of Amnesty International

Salil Shetty (right) shakes hands with junior writers.

What issues is Amnesty working on now with regard to children's rights?

Amnesty International has a strong belief that the future of human rights depends on the young people.

Amnesty works on a range of issues. The question of child rights is very much built into those issues. It's a difficult example to start with, in Japan, but it's the example of the death penalty. And your death penalty is something which Amnesty has been campaigning to stop for about 13 years, or more than that. We've actually had a lot of success campaigning to stop the death penalty. In fact, now, out of the 190 or so countries in the world, 139 countries are no longer practicing executions anymore. More than 100 countries have completely eliminated the death penalty from their constitutions. Within that, particularly the whole issue of the death penalty for children, that's an issue which we've been working on for a long time.

In Japan there are 107 people on death row right now. So that's an issue we'll continue to campaign on in Japan.

When it comes to the question of juvenile executions, three countries we've campaigning in for a long time are Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Sudan. These three are very tricky ones when it comes to juvenile executions because according to international humanitarian law, anybody who is below the age of 18 should not be executed at all.

The second issue I wanted to talk about is unlawful detentions, which means children who have been wrongfully charged or detained on what would be a specific crime. And I wanted to give an example because last month I was in Turkey and I met this boy who was 17. His case is one that Amnesty has been campaigning for a long time.

The office of Amnesty International in Istanbul is a small office and you have to walk up steps. There's no lift or escalator. It's in a very poor area. So you have to climb up five floors on the stairs. Now I asked them to bring the boy to the office to meet me and they said he could not come to the office. So I was wondering why he couldn't come to the office. And they said we have to go down and meet him in a local café. And when I went there and saw him, I realized he was in a wheelchair. He had been shot by the police in his spinal cord and so he has become paralyzed below the waist. The reason for the police shooting him was because he was allegedly expressing views which the government did not like.

In Turkey alone there are estimated to be over 2,000 children who are unlawfully charged or detained. This is, again, against most human rights laws. In Pakistan, we have about 4,500 children like this. So this is the second issue we have been campaigning on for a long time.

I'm really first focusing on the more extreme acts. The other extreme form of child rights abuse is child soldiers. As you know, that's an issue which Amnesty has been campaigning for a long time. Again, child soldiers is prohibited by all laws and all human rights standards. Amnesty is part of a coalition to solve the use of child soldiers. And we've been campaigning on this for a long time. I won't go into the details of this, but as you know, there are many countries in the world which have been using children. And sometimes they say that these children are joining voluntarily. But no, when you are less than 18 years old, you can't fight wars voluntarily. So we have been opposing this for a long time.

Wars and conflicts are the time when you have extreme forms of violence against children. Another campaign we've been running for many years is the campaign to stop sexual violence against women. And part of that campaign is called "safe schools for girls" because there's a lot of abuse of girls in schools as well.

Most of the examples I've given so far, you can say that the government or the state is causing human rights violations. But we also know that society is implicated in many of the violations. For example, I've now come from Indonesia. In Indonesia, I was there for the release of a new report which Amnesty has produced on the issue of the sexual and reproductive rights of girls and women. Indonesia has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the Pacific and Asia region, particularly in the East Asia region. It has a maternal mortality rate of 228 for every 100,000 live births; which basically means that 20,000 Indonesian women die every year, either when they're pregnant or giving birth. So that's what the issue is. One of the big campaigns that Amnesty is running now is also maternal mortality. And anything to do with maternal mortality, of course, directly affects children because mothers and children go together. It's also related to child labor because the women who are dying, the women who are being denied the right to an abortion, for example, a lot of those are young girls who are domestic workers. Indonesia has 1.6 million domestic workers. It's a massive number of domestic workers. And most of those 1.6 million are actually girls, young women and girls. That's effectively an abuse of child labor. And there are no labor rights for children. It's effectively child slavery, an abuse of labor rights. So that's another issue on which we're campaigning.

A lot of the issues are linked to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Specifically, on the right to education, which is the basic right for all children. One of the big problems we're facing in Europe right now is that the people who belong to the Roma are being discriminated against. Particularly the children of the Roma families are not being allowed to go to the main schools. They're being sent to schools where there are mentally retarded children, as if to make it appear that Roma people are mentally retarded. This is discrimination. I said earlier that some of these issues are where governments are responsible for the violation. But there are others where it's the people, it's society, who are discriminating. But whether it's a government that's violating human rights, or whether it's society which is discriminating against people, it is the responsibility of the government to make sure that people's human rights are protected. So we're running a campaign on the rights of Roma children in Europe right now and asking for governments to take responsibility for this action and to guarantee that these children can go to normal schools.

What lies ahead for Amnesty's campaign of protecting children and human rights? And what is a "peaceful world," from your perspective?

The way we're approaching the question of child rights in the future, I think we will basically and consistently use the same approach. When we are working on any human rights issues, we are always particularly focused on the most vulnerable people, and women and children will always be the most vulnerable people. So we integrate child rights into all our campaigns. For example, the work we're doing right now on forced evictions, when people living in urban slums are evicted. We had a case in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. In fact, even with camps immediately after the earthquake in Haiti. So in all these places where we are doing our research and we are doing our campaigning, we take a particularly sharp look at the situation and the reality and the violations against children. We can't look at children in isolation outside the society and families.

Peace and human rights, as far as I'm concerned, are two sides of the same coin. If you have a society where there are no human rights, that society will not have peace. We cannot imagine a society where there's no rule of law and there's no justice. That, in effect, means a jungle and jungle law. And jungles are not very peaceful places.

We are junior high and senior high school students. What can we do to help with the issue of children's rights?

I think the first step for young people is to educate yourselves because you need to know the issues and you need to understand the facts. It's very important to be very clear about the facts. Sometimes the facts are not very obvious. You have to look for them. And you have to read between the lines. So that is the first step. I think that once you understand the facts, once you understand the issues, the next thing you need to do is talk about them with your family and your friends. You're already doing a great job, I feel, projecting the message through the newspaper to the community and to the city of Hiroshima, which is a very important city in the world. And then, of course, you can campaign. Amnesty International has 2.8 million members supporting us across the world. You know, it's always been said that "Never think that a small group of people can't change the world." In fact, it's always only a small group of people who will change the world. If you come together and you take action, and you're part of something noble, like Amnesty International, you can make a difference. We have a lot of expectations of all of you to first get yourself educated and educate other people and then mobilize young people and take action.

What are Amnesty's future plans for its campaign involving children's rights issues, and what is your personal objective in this regard?

Well, I'm the father of two children so I don't need to be persuaded about children's rights. And I have spent a lot of my life working on education. I have lived and worked mainly in Africa and Asia and South Asia so I've seen with my own eyes the extent to which children's rights are not being protected. So me personally, and Amnesty, are very committed to the issue of all human rights, including children's rights. I think the action and the change will come from young people and so that's why I'm really encouraging all of them to get involved, in Amnesty but also in other movements, and take action. Get mobilized and I think that's how change will happen.

(Seira Furukawa, 17, Mei Yoshimoto, 14, Yuka Ichimura, 14, Saaya Teranishi, 14)