Enfance, Enfances - Middle East

Enfance, enfances, 2001

Hiên Lâm Duc

When is a child a child? Until when, is he precisely a child? When can a child carry arms? What about boys and girl’s equity? What about the right for a child to express an opinion on decisions affecting it?

It has taken ten years to answer these and hundreds of other questions. Ten years for a working group formed around the United Nations Centre for Human Rights, UNICEF and a constellation of non-governmental organizations to elaborate the text of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted unanimously by the UN on 20 November 1989. Thanks to this agreement, the world starts to change. Lâm Duc Hiên’s photographs testifies to it.

Iraq

For a long time, Iraq has faced an embargo that, combined with the wounds of its war with Iran, has diminished the life level of its population of many decades. Like everywhere, children are the first victims of conflicts triggered by adults that speak on their name.

Palestine

Thin overpopulated strip of land where all the hopes and the suffers of a long conflict are concentrated, Gaza cannot escape the fate of territories where peace remains a dream: enlisted teenagers, disrupted social life, economic prospects tarnished by the conflict. Will peace in the Middle East would stay an inaccessible dream for long?