Human rights in translation: Bolivia’s law 548, working children’s movements, and the global child labour regime

Abstract

ABSTRACT What happens when children use their own understandings of their human rights to question international standards in the very places where these are adopted and monitored? In this article, we study the encounters of Latin American working children’s movements with members of the European Parliament in Brussels and with ILO staff in Geneva, in an attempt to influence the assessment of Bolivia’s Law 548. The law was drafted with the help of a working children’s movement and diverges from international norms by providing protection to working children of 10 years and older. We invoke the concept of ‘translation’ to analyse how and why the notions of ‘protagonismo infantil’, ‘work as a part of education’, and ‘the right to work in dignity’ were used to challenge the dominant anti-child labour discourse of the EU and the ILO. While these efforts were not successful in a conventional way, we argue that they were important for the political consciousness of Latin American working children’s movements and strengthened their belief that the real defenders of working children’s rights are not the international organisations claiming to act on their behalf, but working children themselves.