An international legal association is all but calling for the legalisation of paedophilia.
The Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists recently published the report “Principles for a Human Rights-Based Approach to Criminal Law Proscribing Conduct Associated with Sex, Reproduction, Drug Use, HIV, Homelessness, and Poverty.”
While the progressive organisation has drawn little attention to its report, released in March, conservative legal experts warn that it represents a yet more dangerous push for the sexualization of children and for removing long-standing protections for children in line with the World Health Organisation’s guidelines on sex education.
Claiming to be based on five years of work by an international collaboration of jurists in response to the UN’s concerns about increasing human rights violations, the document takes the long-standing progressive approach to issues of homelessness, drug use, and civic order, as well as the legalisation of prostitution and abortion, but treads into even more dangerous water regarding the sexual consent of children and adolescents.
Jerzy Kwaśniewski, chairman of the legal think tank Ordis Juris told the European Conservative:
For the first time a document – which claims to be an outcome of expert meetings with the UN Programme on HIV/AIDS and the UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights—officially recommends the (at least partial) decriminalization of sexual acts qualified today as “pedophilic” if a minor is believed to have expressed truly independent and informed consent for a given sexual act. All that under the cover of promoting general principles of criminal law and international human rights standards.
The document states that “parents, guardians, carers, or other persons who enable or assist children … to exercise their sexual and reproductive rights, including by procuring sexual and reproductive health services, goods or information may not be held criminally liable, unless they have engaged in coercion, force, fraud, or there was a lack of free and informed decision-making on the part of the child.”
Additionally, not subjectable to criminal law, according to the report is “consensual sexual conduct, irrespective of the type of sexual activity.”
The document is concerned that the criminalization of these activities might tread on human rights, becoming a cause of discrimination, including age discrimination, which is listed among the types of possible prejudices it can subject people to.
It claims that, as a legal principle, “any prescribed minimum age of consent to sex must be applied in a non-discriminatory manner,” and that “moreover, sexual conduct involving persons below” a country’s legal age of consent “may be consensual in fact, if not in law,” and that “pursuant to their evolving capacities and progressive autonomy, persons under 18 years of age should participate in decisions affecting them, with due regard to their age, maturity and best interests, and with specific attention to non-discrimination guarantees.”
According to Kwaśniewski, the report is a turn in the spiral of reactions caused by the increasingly intense exposure of children to pornography along with the movement to mainstream and normalise not only homosexuality but also transgender sexuality along the lines of Drag Queen Story Hour. Poland, Hungary, France, and some states in the U.S. have enacted child protection laws aimed at limiting youngsters’ exposure to sexually explicit content, a move in line with long-held standards that such exposure is not only morally harmful but also a form of grooming and even sexually abusive itself.
“The polarization of the debate on children’s protection against sexual abuse and explicit content or various types of sexual education programs led to intense legal reactions preventing the sexualization of minors—like in Poland and Hungary—and also when it comes to children’s access to pornography (e.g., Louisiana, Arkansas, France),” Kwaśniewski explained.
“Now the reaction comes from the side of global human rights management institutions. And it goes far beyond our cultural standards, dangerously close to promoting the legalisation of paedophilia,” he added.
He also noted the preponderance of the language in the document, which imitated that of actual laws.
“Not for the first time, the experts from the UN and the WHO take advantage of intentionally projected false authority, typical for all branches of international global management agencies, to exert a chilling effect on intimidated national law enforcement agencies,” Kwaśniewski said. “It is our responsibility as members of the European and Christian culture not only to oppose this but also to actively counteract those attempts to promote such false anthropology detrimental to children and families around the world.”
The International Commission of Jurists did not respond to a request for comment.
