Sharon Slater, President of Family Watch International, spoke at the United Nations Transatlantic Summit earlier this month to shed light on the pressure being placed on African nations to implement comprehensive sexual education for children that includes a right to sexual pleasure and abortion.
Slater began by noting that the United Nations facilitated the creation of nine core human rights treaties, along with human rights mechanisms, to monitor member states’ compliance with those treaties. One of the treaties is The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which Slater discussed.
Committee on the Rights of the Child
The CRC established a Committee on the Rights of the Child to monitor compliance, which issued comments that included a child’s ‘right’ to “sexual and reproductive freedom,” “confidential counseling… without parental or legal consent,” and “sexual education… without the permission of a parent.” These comments from the monitoring committee go against the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Slater explained, which states that “parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”
According to Slater, this committee also recommended specifically to Mozambique that it should “ensure girls’ access to … abortion” despite the fact that the preamble of the CRC states that children have “legal protection, before as well as after birth.”
The committee also issued a comment stating that a child “has a right to preserve their identity and this identity can include their sexual identification.”
The United Nations “experts”
When it comes to sexual education, the United Nation includes as “experts” multiple individuals, including Vernor Muñoz Villalobos, the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education. Muñoz Villalobos called parents a “barrier” to the sexual education of children, whom he claims have a “right to pleasurable sexual experiences.”
Also hired as an “expert” is Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng, whose stated goal is to “elevate sexual pleasure” and to ensure children have comprehensive sexual education.
The Samoa Agreement
Next, Slater discussed The Samoa Agreement, which was scheduled to be signed on November 15 by 105 United Nation member states, the European Union (EU) countries, and 79 African, Caribbean, and Pacific Group of States (ACP) countries. Any of the nations that signed the treaty would have voting rights at the United Nations; however, 35 of the 79 ACP nations refused to sign the agreement — that includes 20 African countries, 9 Caribbean states, and six nations in the Pacific.
The Samoa Agreement includes a chapter on human rights and Article 7 calls human rights “essential” which means, explained Slater, that no amendments can be placed on it. Article 80, meanwhile, requires that all of the countries cooperate with the United Nation’s human rights bodies and mechanisms.
Slide from Sharon Slater’s UN presentation.
Included in the Samoa Agreement are regional protocols. The African Regional Protocol calls for African nations to implement comprehensive sexual and reproductive health rights in accordance with the United Nation’s international technical guidance on sexuality education, said Slater.
“Here’s an example out of that manual,” she said. “It calls on [children] to ‘differentiate between values that they hold, and that their parents/guardians hold about sexuality’ separating children very purposely [from their parents].” It encourages instructing children to “explore same-sex relationships” and pushes the idea of gender identity.
The comprehensive sexuality education it promotes includes teaching children about different sexual acts, including oral sex, pederasty (sexual pleasure from young boys), bestiality, necrophilia, sadism, masochism, coprophilia, masturbation, voyeurism, exhibitionism, and more. Then the children share with the group what they learned about these acts.
The Samoa Agreement is a 20-year binding treaty that the EU nations and the remaining ACP nations did sign. The nations that did not sign the agreement on November 15 have until the end of the year to sign.
International Conference on Population and Development
The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) 20-year “Human Rights” Conference Review included the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Planned Parenthood and Ipas, the creator of the manual vacuum aspiration abortion kits that are promoted in Africa and around the world. UNFPA lists the kit as part of a package of reproductive health services. The document from that review will be required to become a part of the Samoa Agreement, said Slater.
In 2017, the organization DKT International acquired the worldwide rights to distribute the Ipas manual vacuum aspiration technology. DKT International was founded by Philip Harvey and though he stepped down in 2013, he remained active in the pro-abortion movement. Before his death in 2021, he served on the boards of Marie Stopes International, a UK-headquartered organization that promotes abortion (and has been caught committing illegal abortions) in Africa, as well as the U.S. abortion chain Carafem. Harvey gave those groups millions of dollars in funding from money he earned by selling pornographic films and sex toys through his mail-order company, Adam & Eve.
An excerpt from the ICPD human rights review document states, “Bring laws and regulations that criminalize or otherwise impinge on sexual and reproductive rights in accord with social justice and sustainable development including those that restrict access to… comprehensive sexuality education … criminalize consensual same sex relations or sex work, or that deny … abortion.”
It also states that those who sign the treaty must “[r]eaffirm that sexual and reproductive rights are universal human rights, meaning that they are existing rights in national and international human rights instruments to which every individual is entitled by virtue of being a human being, irrespective of age…” (emphasis added).
Slater explained, “This is where Family Watch comes in. Our interest is the protection of children and we are fighting comprehensive sexuality education everywhere and they’re working to make this a human right because they teach [children] sexual things that they are not prepared to handle. They confuse them about their gender identity; if [children] go down that pathway they can become infertile for life, lose their sexual functioning if they go through the medical processes. And we stand for the protection of children.”
Previously, Live Action News published information regarding a UN-linked report written by the International Committee of Jurists (ICJ), UNAIDS and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which also had remarks regarding “sexual rights” and “consent” irrespective of age. That document states:
With respect to the enforcement of criminal law, any prescribed minimum age of consent to sex must be applied in a non-discriminatory manner. Enforcement may not be linked to the sex/gender of participants or age of consent to marriage. Moreover, sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual, in fact, if not in law. In this context, the enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and their right to be heard in matters concerning them.
After the spotlight was shone on this information, UN officials claimed that the document was not meant to apply to sex between adults and minors and a “fact check” was issued by various fact-checking organizations claiming that the implications of the document were misrepresented; however, concerns about that document remain.
