Enfance, Enfances - Europe

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.

Romania

Romania is recovering from a long period of dictatorship and then chaos, and must today reverse the aberrant ideas imposed by the previous regime that families were less able than the state to raise children. Many of them remain abandoned in institutions or wander in the streets, train stations, sewers, looking for unlikely help.

Kosovo

The war that have been embraced Balkans in 1999 will have known an ultimate point, extreme point of violence when a million of Kosovars had to find a refuge in only few weeks in the neighboring countries. They all knew they were letting behind them a devastated province where the worst of violence acts where committed against the ones who didn’t had the time to flee.

Bosnia Herzegovina

The 1990-2000 decade will have seen the bursting and the embrace of what was been Yugoslavia. From this burst were born new countries, news identities, news crisis, and old conflicts have resurfaced, letting Bosnia traumatized. Today, it tried to slowly rebuild, on broken paths.