Human rights and children’s rights have contributed immensely to making the world a safer and more humane place to live in, and also to modernising the political, economic and cultural systems around the world. However, they must never be taken for granted, and each generation must contribute to their development, negotiate them anew and also fight for them to fulfil the pledge of human rights and children’s rights in future. See: www.living-democracy.com/textbooks/volume-5/
If we adults are to contribute to the statement above, we need to be reminded of the responsibility that Article 42 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child carries for us: the duty of governments to inform young people of their rights in various different ways. For me, it is the duty of all us practitioners working with children to provide them with the knowledge, critical understanding and democratic culture that allows them to experience and appreciate their rights.
With this in mind, we used the material from Vol V and worked with shelters for unaccompanied minors in Greece in order to learn and study children’s rights from a creative angle. Children were provided with the CRC translated in their own languages and worked together with their educators to create art projects on the rights they considered most important to their lives.
Photographs, drawings, collages and posters that represented rights that have been brutally violated gave voice to their anger, fear, mistrust, confusion and anguish. Human wrongs were expressed in their art that presented images of their lives and their journeys to Europe.
Younger children also used small objects and Lego bricks to express their rights for survival, participation, development and protection. Issues of health care, family reunification, sexual identity, religion, language and nationality all found their place in art.
The art projects from shelters with unaccompanied minors from different parts of Greece were collected and an exhibition was set up in Athens in the facilities of the Network for Children’s Rights, a Greek non-governmental and non-profit organisation. The exhibition was launched on Tuesday 14 December and will be open to the public and Greek schools until 28 February.
