Media urged to respect children’s rights

Story: Salome Donkor
The Executive Director of Child’s Rights International, Mr Bright Appiah, has urged the media to respect provisions of the 1992 Constitution and other child protection policies that protect the rights of the child.
He said inasmuch as the media need to perform their duties such as exposing wrongdoing in the society, they must also be mindful of the rights of children, as stipulated in the Children’s Act of 1998 (Act 560), the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC),
ratified by Ghana in 1989, as well as other national and international conventions that offer adequate protection for children.
Reacting to a photograph accompanying a story on the operations of a paedophile obtained from a video clip published in the September 10 edition of an Accra daily, that showed the pictures of children engaged in oral sex with the suspect, Mr Bright Appiah said “the publication violated the fundamental principles of the country’s child protection policies”.
He quoted Section 2 (1) of the Children’s Act, which states “The best interest of the child shall be paramount in any matter concerning a child” and Section 2 (2), which states that “The best interest of the child shall be the primary consideration by any court, person, institution or other body in any matter concerned with a child” and said the publication contravened these provisions.
He said Ghana was the first country to ratify the CRC, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on November 20, 1989, which spells out the basic human rights which children everywhere are entitled to.
Article 17 of the CRC recognises "the important function performed by the mass media," and calls on governments who have signed the convention to "ensure that the child has access to information and material from a diversity of national and international sources. " It also encourages the media "to disseminate information and material of social and cultural benefit to the child," and calls on governments to encourage the development of guidelines to protect children from harmful material.
Mr Appiah said the victims had already suffered serious emotional and psychological trauma and needed to be rehabilitated but coverage approach by the paper, which prominently featured the victims, who are minors, with the sexually offensive photographs “promoted obscenity” and grossly violated their rights.
The Daily Guide in its September 10, 2009 edition, published the story and accompanying pictures of victims having oral sex with an alleged American paedophile, Patrick Ken Larbash, 65, who was said to have lured the children, some as young as three, to his house.