MSPs have backed plans to embed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into Scottish law, however, campaigners warn it will “undermine parents and empower the state.”
On Thursday, the Scottish government passed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) Bill.
However, campaigners for families were deeply sceptical about the bill, saying that hiding behind the international human rights treaty that aims to protect the rights of children, they believed that “progressive elites” are increasingly using the idea of children’s rights to “change the values of children.”
It said that this “comes after more than a decade of campaigning by young human rights defenders and human rights organisations across Scotland.”
UNCRC articles establish a comprehensive framework for protecting and promoting the rights of children around the world, such as defining every human being below the age of 18 and respecting the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
Several sections of the original bill, which was passed unanimously in 2021, were ruled by the Supreme Court to be outwith the Scottish Parliament’s legislative competence, following referral by the UK government. MSPs have now backed an amended bill with reduced scope.
“Although Scotland will become the first devolved nation in the world to incorporate the convention into domestic law, we are limited in what we can achieve because of the nature of the devolution settlement.
LGBTQIA+
LGBT lobbyists Stonewall have written a Framing Inclusion Through Rights for The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF). This claims to convey what the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child has to say in relation to “inclusion, diversity and LGBT teaching and learning.”They say they want this to help schools who want to create a culture that supports children who are “Lesbian, Gay, Bi/Bisexual, Trans/Transgender, Questioning or Queer, Intersex or Ace/Asexual (LGBTQIA+) or come from LGBTQIA+ families.”
Schools
The Epoch Times has seen materials from a Scottish school which uses UNCRC articles to claim that “everyone has a right to be called by their name and pronouns” and that “all teachers must sensitively represent diverse identities in their subject area and teaching materials and not re-traumatise individuals.”The Epoch Times contacted the school to confirm the authenticity of the poster and for comment.
The City of Edinburgh Council said they ran the school.
A City of Edinburgh Council spokesperson told The Epoch Times by email: “We follow guidance set out in the Equality Act across all Council business.”
“We understand that different people hold different views and aim to work with our diverse community to respect and support one another,” he added.
“The concern we have at the Scottish Union for Education is that the idea of children’s rights is a confusion of the idea of rights,” lecturer in sociology and criminology at Abertay University and creator of the Scottish Union for Education Stuart Waiton told The Epoch Times.
The union was founded to counter the Scottish government’s education policy, which it claims is indoctrinating school children.
“As I explained in our newsletter, children do not have the capacity to exercise rights, as a result, what we see with this invented term is the empowering of ‘experts’ and the state, often to the detriment of parents,” he said.
“We have witnessed in Scotland, with, for example, the attempt to create a Named Person for every child, that the Scottish state wants to have professional scrutiny of every dimension of a child’s life,” he said, adding that “Trust in parents appears to be particularly low here.”
He added that with a discussion about banning conversion therapy, “we also risk moving to a situation where parents raising questions about the sexuality or the gender identity of their children could soon be a crime in Scotland.”
Talking to parents over the past year, he said it is clear that “some schools are moving to a situation where they feel that it is their job to determine the gender identity of children, often behind the backs of parents.”
“This is justified by talking about ”children’s rights,” he said.
“This should come as no surprise given that the Children Act and the invention of children’s rights is a classic of its time, where a progressive, caring and liberal-sounding initiative emerges that disguises the authority’s domination through the language of liberation,” added Mr. Waiton.
He said that “liberation is also understood, from the U.N. and then in our schools, to mean sexual liberation, of even very young children.”
“Today, it would appear that the ‘progressive’ elites are increasingly using the idea of children’s rights to change the values of children and to attempt to move children away from what are seen as traditional (read common sense) or ”bigoted“ viewpoints of their parents,” he said.
Mr. Waiton added that through all this, “the language of children’s rights comes to mean the authority of the elites to increasingly determine what is right and wrong for our children.”
“In the process, parents and grandparents—the very people who look after and love children—are cast aside, often labelled as ”deplorables,“ he said, adding that rights, properly understood, are ”freedoms that only adults can exercise, free from the state, not freed by it.”
“They provide a liberal and truly progressive framework for all of us to speak our minds and to raise our children in accordance with our own beliefs and values. They allow us to associate with whomever we wish, to set up groups of like-minded individuals who can make themselves heard over the confused din of ”expert“—enforced ”right,” he said.
However, he added that in this respect, “any extension of children’s rights should be understood as a further extension of the power of the new elites to determine the values of both children and parents across Scotland.”
Trojan Horse
Lucy Marsh from the Family Education Trust told The Epoch Times that she believes that the law is a “trojan horse” as it separates children from the family unit.“In terms of transgenderism, in theory, if a child says that they want to go on puberty blockers and go through full-on like, social and then medical transition against their parents’ wishes occurred according to the UNCRC, The child could, in theory, go to court to assert their rights because in law, their rights will be equal or in fact probably exceeding, to that of their parents,” she said.
Ms. Marsh said that she warned that the bill would embed children’s rights in public services, and also embed children’s rights as reportable reporting and monitoring.
“So children could be reporting, monitoring their own family to say that they feel like their human rights are being breached. Which is frightening,” she added.
“That’s one of the first things about totalitarian regimes. They go for the children, they separate the children from the families and they indoctrinate the children to create these new social change activists,” she said.
Ms. Marsh noted that the bill was “quietly” passed, without much media scrutiny.
“I think everyone’s been too busy celebrating that and has not noticed that Scotland has just ratified this into law, and haven’t really realised the implications for it. And then when you then combine that with the fact that they’re saying they’re still going to let children have puberty blockers in Scotland, it will make it very difficult for parents to be able to object if they’re if their child has been indoctrinated in school,” she said.
Richard Lucas, leader of the socially conservative political party the Scottish Family Party told The Epoch Times that rights are a “religion substitute ” in Scottish education.
“So instead of having, you know, Hinduism or the Bible reading, they now have right of the week. And basically, they don’t mean anything. It’s just completely empty,” he said.
He said that the main concern with children’s rights is that they “undermine parents and empower agents of the state.
“This is actually what the Scottish Government wants to do,” he added.
The Scottish Government didn’t respond to a request for comment.
