Cyprus Commissioner Both Pleased, Dissatisfied with Status Quo of Children's Rights

One year after taking up the post as Cyprus Commissioner for Children's Rights, Leda Koursoumba is both pleased and dissatisfied with the status quo of the implementation of children's rights in the country.

She was pleased because the government and other institutions had shown keen and positive interest in her recommendations, but the general mentality of the people toward children's rights still concerned her.

According to the government, the mission of the commissioner was to monitor the level of implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) as a collaborator, and ministers and government departments had been making efforts to comply with their recommendations, she told Xinhua in an interview on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the Convention.

Also, she had been invited to parliamentary committees whenever legislations regarding children's rights were discussed, and the views of the commission were taken into consideration, the commissioner said.

She had just handed in her first annual report on what has been done over the past year, and also the extent of the implementation of the CRC to the president and the parliament speaker, she said.

Despite that, she was aware that required actions were not always possible to be taken, and that the results did not always meet expectations.

When asked about the attitude of the Cypriot people on children's rights, Koursoumba spoke of a paradox.

"The Cypriot society is basically a child-centered one. The Cypriot loves children. Nevertheless, we are still in the track of thought that children are the possessions of the adults. Therefore, adults feel justified to impose their will on their children," the commissioner said.

A survey conducted by her office showed that more than 50 percent of adults and children six years and older were unaware that children were not the possession of parents. Among them, one third believed that parents had the right to impose corporal punishment.

"This, of course, is not acceptable and means we have a long way to go," Koursoumba commented.

One of the major problems concerning the child commissioner was domestic violence, especially violence against children, either physical or psychological.

While she did not know whether such practices were on the rise, she could tell that the rate of violence was high from complaints and reports from various sources like the NGOs, she said.

She conceded that this was a very complicated issue and not easy to combat, "because it requires the government to adopt a number of programs, such as training parents on how to act with positive parenting, giving support to parents in their parental role and creating infrastructure where they can leave their children when both parents are working."

She believed that creating child care infrastructures was very important, because having to leave their children behind when going to work put great strain on the current generation of parents.

What's more, the child commissioner said she had always been trying to engage children in programs so as to make them aware that they were an active and equal part of society.

"We are going to have next week a big celebration to mark the 20th anniversary of the signing of the CRC. We are to have a poster competition in schools and ask the children to express how they feel about the implementation of their rights. We have also asked them to do that through dancing and acting," she said.

When asked about what she considered was her top challenge and how she intended to tackle it, the commissioner said that she had been trying to make enjoyment of children's rights a reality for each child.

Her ambition was to work toward creating a public awareness of children's rights while monitoring policies, legislation, infrastructure, and organizing a number of activities with children and for the children.

Besides, one of her special concerns came from the ethnic diversity in the schools of Cyprus, where children come from other countries and speak different languages.

Through her visits to schools, Koursoumba was positive that children respected the ethnic diversity and felt privileged to have other cultures, ethnic groups, and languages at their schools. They only became biased when influenced by adults.

"Children learn the thoughts we teach them, and if we allow children to grow up with respect for the rights of the child and the principle of non-discrimination, we will have an adult society that respects diversity and understands the notion that the diversity is a wealth in our culture," she said.

She said she had been working on programs to bring together the children in Cyprus, where Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot children have been living apart and did not mingle since the 1974 Turkish military intervention and occupation in response to a Greek military coup.

"We are a small island, and yet my generation has lived apart. We have to work on this. I feel that if we can manage to bring children together from early ages, we will have a chance of succeeding in reuniting the island," Koursoumba said.

(Xinhua News Agency November 20, 2009)