My Year Among Salesians: Let's Begin Again (or, Hello from the other siiiiiiide)

Bonjour from Geneva!

(Yes, in Geneva they speak mostly French…I don’t speak French.)

I’ve been here for a week now and since nothing particularly traumatic happened on my trip over here (like last time) I figured I would wait to post until something interesting happened and/or I knew what I would be doing during my time here. Interesting things have happened AND I know what I’ll be doing, therefore a blog post!

So I’m one of four interns here at the Human Rights for the Instituto Internationale di Maria Auxiliatrice (I think I spelled that right). We’re a pretty diverse with the American (yours truly!), Pedro from Mexico, Maria Rita from Italy, and Gabby from Korea.

During the next three months, we’ll be attending UN meetings on various topics connected to the rights of the child and women’s right, particularly the right to education for all and women’s development. After we attend these meetings, we write up reports or articles about the content of the meeting. They’re only allowed to be a page at most, so it’ll be good practice on figuring out what is most relevant to our mission. It’s pretty chill in terms of workload right now (it’s basically been orientation time), but apparently it’s gonna get crazy when the next Human Rights Council session starts up in March.

But yeah, on Tuesday we went to the UN and got our official badges and wandered around the buildings in the freezing cold so we could take the official tourist photos.

Look at all those flags!!

I think my answer would have to be...world peace

What a good looking group of young adults!

The next day we attended a meeting on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC for short) and its implementation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

FIRST REAL THING

Now bear with me for a moment because will come up again and I need you to understand this review process so that I don’t have to explain it again. Got it? Good.

There are nine core ‘international human rights instruments’ (fancy name for conventions/covenants) that nations can ratify so that they are legally obliged to follow them. There are a lot of other conventions and treaties on different issues (environment, labor, etc.), but these nine are the ones we care about. Some of them have optional protocols (like special consideration for particular topics) and some of them don’t, but you can sign the optional protocols, too. Each Convention has a Committee, which is made of up member States, or countries that are party to the convention. Every once in a while a country will present a report that shows how they are implementing the rules of the Convention in their country, usually responding to recommendations that were made during the last report review. I say every once in a while because sometimes it can be two years or, as in the case of the DRC, it can be eight. Anyway, the member States on the Committee will grill the country representative(s) that is presenting the report on all possible areas of concern and the representative(s) will respond to those questions as best they are able (or answer as vaguely as they are able, depending on the question. Politics.) The Committee, after this grilling, will issue recommendations to the country on what it can do to better adhere to the Convention and make positive progress. The country does not have to follow these recommendations, but considering it’s the UN and they ratified the Convention, they should probably make a good show of trying.

Right, lesson over! Basically we listened to the DRC representative get grilled and her responses to the questions. It was interesting to say the least. I think it will be cool as we continue to figure how politics and diplomacy play out in the UN.

The rest of the week was pretty chill, but Maria Rita, Gabby and I went around Geneva a little bit today just for fun. (Weekends are relaxing time for the most part so I might even get to take a few weekend trips to places farther away!)