NEW YORK - April 6 - As world leaders convene in Geneva for the 60th session of the Commission on Human Rights this week, New York’s children will have a global advocate in Geneva to voice the urgent situation of child poverty in New York City.

The commission which meets annually in Geneva to discuss global human rights violations rarely hears about violations within the U.S. but this year the Human Rights Project of the Urban Justice Center, a New York City based non-governmental organization, has sent a representative to Geneva to urge U.N. delegates to hold the U.S. accountable for violations within its own borders and join the rest of the world and ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Delegate Ejim Dike will testify on behalf of the 12.1 million children who live in poverty right here in the U.S., the three million single mothers who had no work in 2003, and the millions of children making up homeless families.

The U.S. consistently claims domestic laws provide sufficient protection for children in the U.S. but if you ask Ronaldo Bini of Parents in Action, New York’s laws do little to protect children. “New York’s children’s protective services kidnapped my child for 71/2 months with no due process and no legitimate claim against me.” More recently the New York State foster care system failed to protect children from exploitative and harmful practices and was forced to investigate the use of HIV infected infants and children in a foster care agency as “guinea pigs” in potentially dangerous drug research.

In New York City, 97% of children in foster care are black or Latino and disproportionately bare the brunt of abusive practices--another violation of human rights under the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which the U.S. has ratified and is compelled to obligate.

In the 2004 U.S State report on Human Rights violations, U.S. Secretary General Colin Powell charged that "the country reports for 2003 confirms that many -- too many -- governments across the globe still violate the most basic rights of their citizens” yet the U.S. federal government fails to recognize basic rights, such as education, health care, and an adequate standard of living in its own federal constitution and blatantly exempts itself from International treaties and norms that protect these basic economic, social and cultural rights.

In a statement made today before the Commission on Human Rights, Ejim Dike of the Human Rights Project said “We are heartened to see the US issue a press statement asserting that this year, it would focus on upholding international scrutiny of human rights violators. However, we say that such scrutiny should begin at home.”

The chance a child in the US will break the cycle of poverty is severely limited by the lack of all-encompassing quality schooling in the US. In particular, huge disparities based on race continue to exist in the education system. Only 50% of all black, Hispanic and Native American teenagers graduate from high school. In contrast, the graduation rate for white students is 75 %. According to a special New York report issued by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Education, the one key lever for reforming education is significantly increased federal funding, and that does not seem to be imminent in current budget negotiations.

Dike urged the U.S. to “put the welfare of children at the center of its policies, and the UN to take the bold step of holding the US accountable for human rights violations within the US and around the world.”

U.S. NGO participation at this years’ commission meeting has increased and mirrors a nationwide movement to hold the US government accountable to human rights violations within their own borders. In December, a nationwide group of US Human Rights activists launched the US Human Rights Network to monitor and react to a wide range of human rights violations in the US, the Human Rights Project is a founding member of this network.

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