One of the points in the 2023-2026 Action Plan derived from the National Human Rights Strategy addresses awareness of children’s rights, with special attention to the awareness of rights for children with mental health, intellectual and audiovisual problems, refugee and asylum-seeking children, and children involved with the justice system.
In a conversation with Iravaban.net, international expert on children’s rights protection and lawyer Davit Tumasyan noted that various departments and stakeholders are involved in implementing these actions to raise awareness on targeted, specific issues.
“When we talk about informing a child, we must not only give them information, but also provide it in understandable language so they can comprehend it, as legal terms are complex and voluminous, and even adults cannot understand them,” he said.
Our interviewee points to one example for protecting children from sexual abuse: the swimsuit rule, by which parents and relatives warn children that if someone touches them, they should immediately report what happened.
“This is already a preventive action, because the child, even at 3 years old, trusts their grandmother, grandfather, or parent, comes and says: someone on the street touched me in this place, and then that same parent should understand what preventive actions to take,” he said, adding that there is always a need for awareness, as even young children in Armenia become victims of sexual crimes, and the actions specified in the strategy should be carried out even beyond the timeframes.
Speaking about another action specified in the strategy—defining the concept of violations of children’s rights and creating a unified statistical system for recording and managing them by defining the concept of “violation of children’s rights” and an authorizing norm regarding the unified statistical system for recording and managing children’s rights—Tumasyan said: “Internationally, we do not have a common approach to what constitutes a violation of children’s rights. Moreover, the ‘Law on the Rights of the Child’ in force in the Republic of Armenia has long not been applied, has a declarative nature, and does not provide effective mechanisms.”
According to Davit Tumasyan, it is unrealistic to list all types of violations of children’s rights, and even those states that have attempted to do so have not succeeded, which suggests that this strategic action will not be implemented but will have its separate manifestations.
“For those types of violence that are not enshrined in the Criminal Code, we have a serious problem with statistics: where will this information be collected from, who will collect it, how will it be accumulated, and what analytical work should be done with it,” said Tumasyan.
Details in the video.
