United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, arrived on Wednesday 19 July to Venezuela for a 3-day visit. On Thursday afternoon, the High Commissioner, human rights organizations and multiple victim groups met. In this space of one hour, 26 spokesmen were able to make requests to the High Commissioner. 20 of these interventions are registered in this document, which represents an overview of the activists’ demands for the human dignity of the country in a context characterized by the lack of democracy, increase in poverty and forced migration.
Below is one of such interventions.
We alert the impact of the complex humanitarian emergency on children’s lives, it includes a long-standing institutional violence and does not obey the current political situation.
We identify four major omissions of the State:
1. A State without direction: a public policy with a rights approach is not available, public policies are seriously undermined with an economic emergency decree or a state of exception that deepens dependence on government charity
2. A State without information: There is no official data that allow identifying the extent of harm to children, despite the recommendations made by the United Nations.
3. A State without money: there are no rights without budget; public investment for children is unknown. The priorities of public investment are not towards the protection of the rights of childhood.
4. A solitary and authoritarian State: any process of independent participation that questions is silenced and criminalized.
These omissions generate death and suffering in kids:
There are violent deaths of children by homicides and at the hands of state security agencies: every 6 hours a child died violently in 2018; death at the hands of police agencies increased by 287%, as well as repression especially towards adolescents in popular sectors.
There are deaths of children that could have been avoided: the State recognized in 2016 a 30.12% increase in deaths of children under one year old. Today, all the causes of infant and maternal mortality have aggravated.
A system that expels children from school: today, children are absent from school due to hunger, lack of transportation, water, food and even the absence of teachers.
Special contexts that condemn life and development: forced recruitment, child labor, sexual violence, and the detrimental effects of mining activities or living on the streets are daily realities, without protective measures, whatever little is done responds to civil society initiatives.
Forced migration dismantles the family: more than 3 million Venezuelans have migrated, leaving at least 800,000 children behind. Since thousands of children suffer and die each year, the United Nations must fulfill its role in protecting human rights, especially for children and adolescents.
