Human Rights Developments

Child Soldiers

Refugee, Immigrant, and Stateless Children

Children in Conflict with the Law

Child Labor

Violence and Discrimination Against Students

After its unanimous adoption by 174 nations in June 1999, the new Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labor (ILO Convention 182) had by mid-2000 achieved the fastest pace of ratification in ILO history. By late September, thirty-seven countries had ratified the convention, which entered into force on November 19, 2000. The new convention represented a global consensus to end the most abhorrent forms of child labor, and required states to take immediate measures to abolish such practices as child slavery, trafficking, debt bondage, child prostitution and pornography, and forced labor, including the forced recruitment of children for use in armed conflict.

A growing international commitment to address child labor was also seen through new and innovative programs for at-risk children and their families. In Latin America, programs in Brazil and Mexico provided monthly stipends for low-income families who kept children in school. The programs, which sometimes also provided after-school activities and income generating projects for families, served over 2.5 million children, and were designed to provide incentives for education and offset the poverty that most often drives poor children into the workplace. Similar initiatives were planned for Ecuador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

Some ninety countries were engaged in the ILO's International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC). From just one donor country and six participating states in 1992, IPEC in 2000 had nearly twenty-five donors and more than sixty-five participating countries. In partnership with UNICEF, trade unions, the private sector, and nongovernmental organizations, IPEC initiated dozens of programs to prevent child labor, remove children from child labor and provide them with rehabilitation and relevant education, and provide their parents with improved livelihoods, jobs, or income.

The United States increased its contributions to IPEC from U.S. $3 million per year to $30 million per year over the last four years-a ten-fold increase that doubled IPEC's budget. In May, the U.S. Congress also adopted a landmark trade bill, which for the first time conditions U.S. trade benefits on a country's progress in eliminating the worst forms of child labor. The Trade and Development Act of 2000 denies U.S. trade preferences to countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America that have not implemented their commitments to eliminate the worst forms of child labor as established by ILO Convention 182.

However, despite increased donor support, programs and legal commitments, abusive child labor remained a serious problem around the world. The ILO estimated that 250 million children between five and fourteen worked for a living, and that over 50 million children under age twelve worked in hazardous circumstances. Child laborers hauled wagons underground in coal mines, drew molten glass in stifling temperatures, worked with glues and solvents in the shoe and leather industry, bent over carpet looms, picked garbage from dump sites, and toiled long hours as domestic workers.

One of the most common forms of child labor in both industrialized and developing countries was the use of children in agriculture. In the United States, over 300,000 children worked as hired laborers on commercial farms, frequently under dangerous and grueling conditions. Human Rights Watch found that child farmworkers in the United States worked long hours for little pay and risked pesticide poisoning, heat illnesses, injuries, and life-long disabilities. They accounted for 8 percent of working children in the United States but suffered 40 percent of work-related fatalities.

Children working on U.S. farms often worked twelve-hour days, sometimes beginning at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. They reported routine exposure to dangerous pesticides that cause cancer and brain damage, with short-term symptoms including rashes, headaches, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting. Young farmworkers became dizzy from laboring in 100/F temperatures without adequate access to drinking water, and were forced to work without access to toilets or hand washing facilities.

Agriculture was the most dangerous occupation open to children in the United States and caused high rates of injury from work with knives, other sharp tools, and heavy equipment. An estimated 100,000 children suffered agriculture-related injuries during the year.

Long hours of work also interfered with the education of children working in the fields, making them miss school and leaving them too exhausted to study or stay awake in class. Only 55 percent of farmworker children in the United States finished high school.

The plight of child farmworkers in the United States was rooted in poverty-level wages that left adult farmworkers unable to support their children, weak enforcement of child labor laws, and inadequate legal protections that allowed children in agriculture to work at younger ages, for longer hours and under more hazardous conditions than minors in other jobs. Federal laws dating back to 1938 permitted children as young as twelve to work unlimited hours in agriculture, and allowed children of sixteen to work under hazardous conditions. In contrast, children in other occupations could not work before age fourteen, could only work three hours on a school day until age sixteen, and were not allowed to perform hazardous work until age eighteen. Because 85 percent of U.S. farmworkers were racial minorities-the vast majority Latino-the law's double standard amounted to de facto race-based discrimination.

Even to the limited extent that U.S. laws did protect farmworker children, they were not adequately enforced. The U.S. Department of Labor, charged with enforcement of the child labor, wage and hour provisions of federal labor law, cited only 104 cases of child labor violations in fiscal year 1998, even though an estimated one million child labor violations occur in U.S. agriculture every year. Compounding the problem, penalties were typically too weak to discourage employers from using illegal child labor.

On September 25, 2000, Senator Tom Harkin introduced legislation to amend U.S. labor laws to protect all working children equally. The bill was pending before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions at this writing.

In Egypt, an estimated 1.2 million children took part in controlling cotton leafworm infestations during the summer months, by manually removing damaged portions of leaves. In October 1999, Human Rights Watch conducted an investigation into the use of child labor in Egyptian cotton pest management and found that the children were typically hired well below the minimum age for seasonal agricultural employment in Egypt, labored far in excess of the hours and days permitted under Egypt's Child Law, and were routinely beaten by their foremen. They also faced serious health risks posed by exposure to heat and, in some cases, pesticides.

The children were employed by the agricultural cooperative societies in their respective villages, acting under the authority of the agriculture ministry. According to an agricultural engineer with one of the cooperatives, children were exclusively recruited for the work because they could be paid less than adults, were more obedient, and had the appropriate height for removing damaged leaves. Although the Child Law set the minimum age for seasonal agricultural employment at twelve years, a majority of children engaged in leafworm control operations were below the age of twelve, with a significant proportion employed from the age of seven or eight.

Cooperatives appeared to have little difficulty in recruiting children. Growing rural poverty, coupled with a steady decline in the percentage of farm land allocated to cotton, gave rise to an ample supply of child wage labor in much of rural Egypt. Children typically earned an average of E£3 (about U.S. $1) per day and worked from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. daily, with a one to two hour midday break, seven days a week. Supervising groups of fifteen to thirty, foremen routinely beat children with wooden switches whenever they perceived a child to be slowing down or overlooking leaves.

Measures to protect working children from heat-related illnesses were inconsistent and often inadequate. For example, children in some villages had to bear the cost of purchasing protective caps as well as a pail for storing water. Requests for water were often granted only at the discretion of their foremen.

In some cases, children may have been exposed to toxic organophosphate and carbamate pesticides. Such exposure can lead to pesticide poisoning that is both acute-with effects such as dizziness, vomiting, or diarrhea-and chronic, including disruption of the nervous, endocrine, or reproductive systems. In the villages Human Rights Watch visited, children either resumed work immediately after the fields were sprayed or following a twenty-four to forty-eight hour hiatus, which may still have been inadequate given the heightened susceptibility of children to pesticide intoxication. Although the agriculture ministry adopted an integrated pest management program to reduce pesticide use, farmersaddressed a perceived shortfall in pesticide application with additional spraying of their own, often with readily available pesticides identified as highly hazardous by the World Health Organization.