Page 2678 - Week 12 - Thursday, 16 November 1989
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wishing to fall into the same trap, let me say that it is the stuff of Dr Goebbels, the purveyor of the big lie. Certainly Mr Stevenson is not being that extreme but his methods follow an all too familiar pattern: distortion, fear mongering and appeal to authority. There may be, in the numerical fragmentation of parties in the Assembly, a vague echo of the parliaments of the Weimar Republic. That should be where the similarity ends. Let us make sure that it does.
We often take our rights for granted in this country. We often assume that they are well entrenched and secure even though, unlike many democracies, we have no formal statement of them. We forget not only that our own situation is tentatively defined but that there are many countries where human rights are far less secure and the need for them is a much more urgent item on the agenda. Also we tend to forget rapidly the images on television of 12- and 13-year-olds being oppressed or exploited in the Iran-Iraq war, the West Bank, Belfast, and I could go on. We can forget how political, social and economic factors rob children of the right to freedom and knowledge as well as power over their own destinies in the same way as their parents are robbed by the same processes. We may even want to pretend to ourselves that these things do not happen here, but they do. Social, racial and economic oppression is as real, if not as extensive, as elsewhere. So anything which imposes moral persuasion on our governments to protect our rights and the rights of our children is to be welcomed.
I welcome this convention. It is timely, comprehensive and, above all, necessary. I would not subscribe to a process which forces meanings between the lines of a handful of articles in an attempt to condemn the whole document. If the choice, which is what Mr Stevenson's narrow analysis tries to force on us, is between rejecting or accepting the convention as a whole, I accept it.
I accept it too because I believe that Mr Stevenson's attempt to quarrel with it is muddle-headed and inaccurate. He is concerned, for example, that article 2 allows children to get away with not obeying their parents on religious matters, medical treatment, and so on. I ask him to read it again, to read the words that are there without forcing other words - his own calculated, chosen synonyms, his own peculiar meaning - into it. I may be wrong; but I have a suspicion, just a suspicion, based on the fact that I have been using the English language for quite a while, that the article prevents someone from discriminating against or punishing a child because of religion or the views of that child's parents. In any case, article 5 is the one that he should be looking at. There, parents are given the right to provide direction and guidance.
The most sensational of Mr Stevenson's allegations concerned his distortion of the right of freedom of association and the right to information as somehow
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