بقلم دارلين أوزويغوي

“Advancing children’s rights in order to address child labour risks really is not a favor being done to children. It’s an obligation that states have to protect the rights of children who are going to be the future leaders.”— Dr. Chairman Okoloise

غالباً لا تفشل الحقوق بسبب غيابها، بل تفشل لأنها تظل غير مكتملة.

بقيت تلك الفكرة عالقة في ذهني لفترة طويلة بعد انتهاء الندوة الإلكترونية. نُظمت الندوة الإلكترونية، التي كانت بعنوان "معهد حقوق الإنسان والتنمية في أفريقيا (IHRDA)"، من قبل معهد حقوق الإنسان والتنمية في أفريقيا (IHRDA). عمالة الأطفال ومساءلة الشركات في أفريقيا: تعزيز مسؤولية الشركات عن حماية حقوق الطفل, لقد غيرت هذه التجربة طريقة تفكيري في الحقوق - ليس كضمانات قانونية ثابتة، ولكن كشيء يجب تحقيقه باستمرار.

وقد جمع هذا الحدث المتحدث الرئيسي الدكتور أويينيي آبي، الأستاذ المساعد في كلية ماكجورج للقانون، إلى جانب الدكتور رئيس مجلس الإدارة أوكولويز، الخبير في الفريق العامل المعني بحقوق الطفل والأعمال التجارية التابع للجنة الخبراء الأفريقية المعنية بحقوق الطفل ورفاهيته (ACERWC)، والدكتور شيميليس تسجاي تيسيما، مدير البرامج في المنتدى الأفريقي لسياسات الطفل (ACPF)، حيث قام المتحدثون بدراسة المجالات المتداخلة لمساءلة الأعمال التجارية، ومسؤولية الدولة، وحقوق الطفل، موضحين أن حماية الأطفال من الاستغلال الاقتصادي تتطلب أكثر بكثير من مجرد الحظر القانوني وحده.

زيادة لا يزال 100 مليون طفل حول العالم يعملون في عمالة الأطفال. with Sub- Saharan Africa continuing to bear the highest regional prevalence. While major regions like Asia and the Pacific reflect downward trends in child labour, تمثل منطقة أفريقيا جنوب الصحراء الكبرى الآن ما يقرب من ثلثي جميع حالات عمالة الأطفال في العالم., driven by a combination of rapid population growth, persistent poverty, conflict, and limited access to education. These figures illustrate a difficult reality: despite decades of legal progress, millions of children remain exposed to exploitation.

International and regional human rights instruments, including the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, have long affirmed children’s right to be protected from economic exploitation. Yet, despite this legal framework, millions of children across Africa continue to be exposed to hazardous and exploitative forms of labour. The challenge, therefore, is no longer simply recognising children’s rights. It is ensuring those rights can provide meaningful protection in practice.

This tension reveals a fundamental truth: recognition is only the beginning. Rights, like anything intended to endure, require the right conditions to take root, to grow, and to be sustained.

من خلال هذا المنظور، وجدت نفسي أتساءل عما يجب أن يحدث قبل أن يصبح حق الطفل أكثر من مجرد وعد قانوني. أعتقد أن الإجابة تكمن فيما أصفه بدورة حياة الحق. يُرسى الحق من خلال الاعتراف القانوني، ويُدعم من خلال تحديد المسؤوليات بوضوح، ويُحمى من خلال عواقب وخيمة على من ينتهكه، ويُستعاد من خلال سبل انتصاف فعالة عند وقوع الانتهاكات. هذه المراحل الأربع المترابطة هي التي تحدد ما إذا كان الحق سيبقى مجرد تطلعات أم سيصبح ذا معنى. عندما تنقطع دورة الحياة هذه، قد يستمر الحق في الوجود قانونيًا، لكن قوته الحامية تتلاشى عمليًا.

To understand how this life cycle operates, it is helpful to examine each of its four elements.

Recognition

Recognition establishes children not merely as beneficiaries of goodwill, but as independent rights-holders entitled to legal protection. Yet recognition also requires specificity. The webinar highlighted that children are often subsumed within broader references to “vulnerable groups,” resulting in business and human rights frameworks that insufficiently account for children’s distinct vulnerabilities and developmental needs.

This gap has tangible consequences across Africa. Despite legal prohibitions against child labour, children continue to work in sectors such as agriculture, artisanal mining, and domestic labour in conditions that threaten their health, education, dignity, and development. The persistence of child labour demonstrates that recognising children’s rights, while essential, is only the first step towards ensuring their effective protection.

Effective child protection therefore begins by making children visible, not only within international conventions, but also within the design and implementation of domestic legislation, public policy, and institutional decision-making.

كان من بين الاستجابات المهمة استمرار دعوة المجلس الأفريقي لحقوق الطفل ورفاهية المرأة (ACERWC) لإدماج حقوق الطفل في خطط العمل الوطنية المتعلقة بالأعمال التجارية وحقوق الإنسان. وقد تعززت هذه الدعوة من خلال أبحاث أجرتها منظمات مثل معهد حقوق الإنسان والتنمية في أفريقيا (IHRDA)، الذي أصدر تقريره لعام 2025، “Building Tomorrow: Study on Child Rights Mainstreaming in National Policies and Action Plans on Business and Human Rights in Africa” underscored both the importance of integrating children’s rights into business and human rights frameworks and the significant gaps that remain. A key finding of the report was that only 5 of Africa’s 55 countries have National Action Plans on Business and Human Rights. Of these, only few make specific and separate reference to children’s rights, highlighting the urgent need to better embed children’s rights within business and human rights policies and practice across the continent.

Recognition requires that children remain visible wherever laws, policies, and business practices are developed and implemented.

Responsibility

Every recognised right must also identify those responsible for giving effect to it. Rights acquire practical meaning only when corresponding duties are clearly assigned and effectively discharged. Responsibility, therefore, is the second stage in the life cycle of a right.

States remain the primary duty-bearers responsible for respecting, protecting, promoting and fulfilling children’s rights through effective legislation, labour inspection systems, access to justice, and regulatory oversight. However, as the webinar emphasised, responsibility does not rest with governments alone.

Businesses also bear responsibilities that extend well beyond compliance with domestic labour laws. The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), together with the Children’s Rights and Business Principles, (jointly developed by UNICEF, the UN Global Compact, and Save the Children), make clear that businesses have a responsibility to respect children’s rights throughout their operations, business relationships, and value chains. This responsibility requires businesses not only to avoid causing or contributing to harm, but also to proactively identify, prevent, mitigate, and address adverse impacts on children’s rights.

As Dr. Oyeniyi Abe explained during the webinar that businesses become implicated in child labour in several ways, violating these principles. Harm may occur directly through employing children. It may occur indirectly when purchasing practices, production deadlines, or pricing pressures encourage suppliers to rely upon child labour. Businesses may also become linked to exploitation by benefiting from child labour embedded within complex supply chains, even when children never appear on their own payrolls.

تُظهر هذه الأمثلة أن عمالة الأطفال نادراً ما تكون مشكلة معزولة في مكان العمل. بل هي غالباً نتاج قرارات تجارية تُتخذ على امتداد سلسلة التوريد، حيث تُهيئ الحوافز التجارية وممارسات الشراء والرقابة غير الكافية الظروف التي تُعرّض حقوق الأطفال للخطر. لذا، يجب أن تمتد المسؤولية لتشمل، بالإضافة إلى أصحاب العمل والشركات، النظام البيئي التجاري الأوسع الذي يُتيح الاستغلال أو يُسهّله أو يستفيد منه.

Meaningful corporate accountability requires child-sensitive human rights due diligence, robust supply-chain mapping, responsible purchasing practices, transparent reporting, effective monitoring, and meaningful engagement with workers, communities, and children themselves. Businesses must actively identify risks before harm occurs rather than simply responding after violations are exposed.

Ultimately, responsibility is not measured by the existence of corporate policies alone, but by whether states and businesses take concrete steps to prevent harm, protect children from exploitation, and ensure that commercial activities uphold rather than undermine children’s rights. Rights remain vulnerable unless failures carry consequences.

Repercussions

A right without accountability risks becoming aspirational rather than protective. The panelists repeatedly challenged the assumption that voluntary commitments alone are sufficient to safeguard children. Supplier self-reporting, corporate codes of conduct, and periodic audits all have a role to play, but they cannot substitute for meaningful oversight or enforceable obligations.

Accountability requires more than good intentions; it requires systems capable of detecting violations, enforcing legal standards, and deterring future harm. Violations must produce consequences capable of reinforcing that children’s rights are legally enforceable rather than merely ethically desirable.

This responsibility extends beyond the corporate actor to the state. Governments have a continuing obligation to ensure that labour laws are effectively enforced through labour inspections, regulatory oversight, judicial and administrative remedies, and other accountability mechanisms capable of responding to violations. Without effective state oversight, even well-designed legal frameworks risk becoming ineffective in practice.

Yet the discussion also cautioned against understanding repercussions solely through punishment. Dr. Shimelis Tsegaye Tesemma observed that “many responses to child labour remain reactive rather than preventative, intervening only after exploitation has already occurred”.

Simply removing a child from work, without addressing the conditions that compelled that child to work in the first place-including poverty, conflict, inequality, inadequate social protection or opaque supply chains, may unintentionally expose children to different forms of exploitation or push child labour further underground.

Effective accountability must therefore be preventative as well as corrective. It should encourage business and governments to identify and address risks before violations occur while ensuring that those responsible for harm are held accountable when children’s rights are breached. In this sense, repercussions are not solely about punishment, they are about strengthening systems that prevent exploitation and reinforce respect for children’s rights.

Redress

A child whose rights have been violated requires more than the removal of immediate harm. Justice demands restoration. Throughout the webinar, speakers emphasized the importance of accessible and effective grievance mechanisms, rehabilitation services, educational reintegration, psychosocial support, and long-term assistance that enables children to rebuild their futures. Perhaps most importantly, redress must remain child centered. Children frequently encounter significant barriers when seeking justice, including inaccessible complaint mechanisms, limited legal representation, and institutional processes designed primarily for adults. These barriers often prevent children from reporting violations participating meaningfully in proceedings or accessing remedies capable of addressing the full impact of exploitation.

Across many African contexts, access to these remedies remains constrained by under-resourced justice systems, weak enforcement mechanisms, limited legal aid, social stigma, and fear of retaliation. As a result, many children who experience labour exploitation are often unable to obtain the protection, rehabilitation or compensation to which they are entitled.

Justice is measured not simply by whether exploitation has ceased, but by whether children recover the dignity, security, education, well-being, and فرص that every right is ultimately intended to protect.

Dr. Chairman Okoloise concluded the discussion with a reminder that captures this responsibility with striking clarity: protecting children’s rights is not an act of generosity; it is the fulfillment of a legal obligation and a moral mandate.

Ultimately, no single institution can carry that responsibility of protecting children’s rights in the context of business alone. The weight of protecting children’s rights must be balanced across the shoulders of states, businesses, and civil society, each bearing a distinct but indispensable duty. States must strengthen legal and regulatory frameworks to make sure children are visible in business and human rights governance; businesses must embed child rights into their due diligence and operations; and civil society must continue to campaign for accountability where rights are denied.

A right reaches its fullest expression only when every stage of its life cycle is allowed to unfold. Recognition without protection is fragile. Protection without accountability is hollow. Accountability without redress is incomplete.

About the Author:

Darlene Uzoigwe is a second-year law student at Columbia Law School and a 2026 summer intern at the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA). She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where she studied Government and Global Health & Health Policy.