The speech by Boris Altshuler, chair of the NGO Right of the Child, at a meeting with Navanethem Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, at the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation.

 

 

 

At the start of my speech, having thanked the UN High Commissioner for the opportunity to have this meeting, I briefly introduced myself. From the 1970s I was involved in the human rights movement in the USSR, working in close contact with Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov for nearly 20 years, and for the past 14 years I have devoted myself to the protection of the rights of children together with my colleagues from the NGO Right of the Child. I then went on to say the following:

 

In 1999 I met with one of your predecessors in the post of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs. Mary Robinson, in Geneva. We discussed the issue of protecting children's rights in Russia; the same difficult problems, in other words, that we're going to be talking about today. In 1999 the Coalition of Russian NGOs presented its Alternative Report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child which commented on the Second Periodic Report of the Russian Federation regarding the observance of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in the Russian Federation. We prepared the next Alternative Report in 2005 and now, in 2011, we're once again preparing a similar report in connection with the presentation of Russia's next Periodic Report at the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

 

Unfortunately, however, just like previous reports our new Alternative Report is not optimistic. Russian bureaucracy cannot be influenced in any way, including in its disregard for the UN Committee's often-repeated recommendations on implementing the Convention and creating effective mechanisms in Russia to protect the rights of children. Hopes for a breakthrough in this area recently emerged linked with the creation of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation as a structure independent of executive’s bureaucracy, as well as the establishment in September 2009 of the post of Commissioner for Children’s Rights under the President of the Russian Federation, an office with which we are collaborating closely.

 

I would now like to talk about a number of acute problems which have also been included in the letter which I gave to you now.

 

1. The mass institutionalisation of children. More than 400 thousand children are living permanently in residential homes in Russia, 1,5% of all children in the country. Of these, 25% are orphans, the rest are children given into State care by their parents because of child’s limited health capacity or the unfavourable socio-economic conditions in the families. That is, where the family is unable to cope with the situation itself, but there is no help at hand as the Russian social system does not provide help ‘within the home’, it knows only how to destroy a family, how to separate children and parents.

 

2. An effective (and extremely destructive) mechanism for the institutionalization of children is segregation in the field of education. A new law ‘On Education in the Russian Federation’ is currently under development, but conservatives from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation have so far disregarded all amendments to the legislation, including those proposed by the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation aimed at turning the traditional exclusive principle of the Russian education system into the inclusive one adopted in the civilized world.

 

3. The worst thing about this segregation of children with special educational needs is the over-diagnosis of mental deficiency, when so-called medical-psychological-pedagogical commissions declare children unteachable and send them off to orphanages run by social security authorities for life. For two years now I have been trying to save a boy from just such an orphanage, the Raznochinovsky Orphanage in Astrakhan Region. The legendary foster mother Vera Drobinskaya would like to foster the boy, who is called Vasya Makarov. But nothing is happening! In December 2010 Pavel Astakhov, Children's Rights Commissioner under the President of the Russian Federation, met with this family along with Vasya Makarov, who is now over 16 years old. His considered opinion was that the child could be fostered by a family. But even his opinion has so far been ignored by the authorities in Astrakhan Region. It may be supposed, of course, that there are serious reasons for such an uncompromising attitude, first and foremost of a corrupt nature: returning a child back to normal life from this underworld would be most likely to expose abuses in the illegal use of money for the ‘disabled’ accrued in children's savings books and illegal use of their accommodations and so on.