Why the United Nations and Member States Must Concede the Need for Shared Child Equity Reparations
Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He previously served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and with a national security law agency before developing a comprehensive account of reforming family planning for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal. He is a contributor to the Observatory
Esther Afolaranmi is a Co-Executive Director at the Fair Start Movement and the Founder of the Golden Love and Hands of Hope Foundation. She is an Attorney, humanitarian, avid researcher, and writer. Esther is deeply passionate about social changes in Africa and around the world.
Mwesigye Robert is Founder of Rejoice Africa Foundation. He is a public health expert, clinician, humanitarian and climate activist passionate in investing in women and children as the primary driver in saving the next generation.
Beatrix Homler is an animal and human rights activist based in New York. She is the head of communications at the Fair Start Movement, a consultant at Rejoice Africa Foundation, and a board member at the Education for African Animal Welfare Foundation. Homler made a significant career shift to advocate for those who are marginalized and in need of support.
Her academic background in fashion-business development and psychology allows her to approach challenges with a unique blend of strategic thinking and empathy. Born in Europe, she speaks Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, English and French.
Facts:
Today children are being born in a way that reverses the impacts claimed by many.
That’s happening because of a lie – because wealthy families and governments in designing reproductive rights regimes treated the act of having children as more personal to the parents than interpersonal for the children and the communities they comprise. This lie was told to avoid having to cover the high costs of ensuring future children’s rights as the legitimate basis for reproductive rights and to make money on the growth that a lack of protection would ensure.
In this situation of denial, the Rejoice Africa Foundation has devised an Afrocentric/women care group model, fixing the genesis of climate crisis and inequality in today's generations. Because development towards emancipation as free and equal adults is primary to all other obligations, Rejoice uses reparations to ensure birth equity as equal share equity in one’s democracy override other entitlements.
This would require the moving of illegitimately entitled resources from extreme concentrations of wealth and power instead to young women in the form of life saving and reparative planning accounts, matched to debt carried by the wealthiest. It demands nonviolence but also account for the illegitimate violence of the state - usually used to shield concentrations of wealth and power. These concentrations are the product of not having prioritized bottom up empowerment on the eight metrics before now, but instead exploiting unsustainable growth and disenfranchisement.
Why Share Equity First?
Why start all you do with fair starts in life for kids, or the rewilding of the world through measurable share equity in your democracy? Do this basic scam-check: Ask one question of anyone claiming to create value in the world.
Ask them to account for children entering the world and any entitlements they have, as key variables in the good the claimant claims to do. The question will show the individual or entity you are engaging with starts from a position of contradicting their claimed values and moving towards a future that harms many - in eight measurable ways, discussed below.
How Did We Get Here?
In 1948 the legitimacy of nations to protect wealth and property rights – and the lives of those who benefited most from the political systems – was made contingent on nations complying with human rights that empower their subjects, the subjects from whom all legal authority derives.
This would have started with moving extreme wealth made at deadly cost, using it to cover family planning entitlements to young women, inverse to wealth and income, that ensure they only have children at a time, place and with resources that offset all the harm the externalization of the wealth’s true costs caused.
Humans can only constitute the future through the language of obligation and the linguistic creation of power relations, and the fundamental mistake we all seem to be making is that our obligation is inverted: It would be physically impossible to be free unless we see ourselves as first obligated to persons who will parent, rather than first ruled by those at the top of the influence pyramid, e.g. officials, the wealthy, CEOs, celebs, etc., because all entitlement to influence derives from the governed and their primary equitable positioning. The latter should only have influence to the extent the creation of others ensures measurable (eight metrics as least, discussed below) equity.
National legitimacy, and the ability of nations to assign entitlements to wealth and to protect the lives of the wealthy, is contingent on human rights that empower subjects as political equals. This is the first human right, the right to share equity - or an equal and influential role in self-determining limitation of the power and influence others have over you - and whether nations are assuring the right can be measured with discrete metrics.
Sovereignty of nations derives from the sovereignty - or self-determination - of its subjects, and an easy measure is whether each new child born into the world is seen as capable of offsetting or countermanding the vote and voice of existing persons, relative to a neutral threshold. That would show they are truly empowered as political equals, and we would invest heavily in them - starting with a reproductive rights model actually based on children’s rights to conditions of birth and development that ensured inclusion - to ensure they used that power responsibly.
Time, and a Sleight of Hand
But between 1948 and 1968, when the United Nations and member states should have been shifting their power from the top down systems of coercion protecting existing entitlements to bottom up systems of inclusion and empowerment, instead they did the opposite.
Controlled by a handful of mostly white and wealthy men whose criteria for evaluating truth and value came from the castes in which they were born and saw the world, through various mechanisms the UN avoided the shift from to down power to button up inclusion.
This included conflating the act of having children and not having children under a veil of personal autonomy or privacy, and failing to include share equity and children's rights in the model. Instead they used a mangled version of freedom - freedom from taxes, from governance and regulations, from obligation to animals and the environment, freedom from duties to others, etc. to benefit at cost to others, causing the current state of world affairs.
More specifically, they treated having children as an act of autonomy, bundled up with the act of not having kids, because that form of autonomy would define the concept of power in a way that avoided questioning certain entitlements.
They sold us the idea that the dangerous and powerful were the men with guns in government, and the castle of the home was an autonomous zone to be protected from it. That’s not the definition of conception of power that makes democracy work.
Power in the useful sense is any form of human influence, the mass aggregate of human activities that is killing millions in the climate crisis, and it begins as we – and our relations to others – are created fundamentally through birth and development. Watch for others entering the world, not the leaders with money and guns they will become.
This was power over others, not self-determination for all, and the misconception operated mostly by taking the element of time out of the equation, and assuming certain relations. But families are not just in the social contract; they are constitutive of it.
We can take back those costs and invest them in would-be parents to make them bottom up inclusive or legitimate (e.g. ensuring before anyone has a child, that a health, education and emergency birth planning and savings account in place and linked to climate debtors) and we may do so by all means effective because who we should be in terms of the creation of fundamental power relations always comes first.
For any government to call anything law, they either are including their subjects in the process sufficiently or they are not.
The UN has cleared the way
All sovereignty derives from the sovereign relations of individuals. The obligation to follow the law or any other hierarchy is based on one's capacity for self-determination and legitimacy but in 1968 mostly wealthy white men removed that requirement from international human rights. Our crises today flow from that.
Leaders publicly role modeling using their influence (money, media, laws, etc.) as obligation to young women inverting the system, rather than as charity in the existing structure, and before any obligation to pay taxes, is a great way to invert obligation, from top down to bottom up.
The UN has the power to correct obvious and significant errors in state legitimacy and sovereignty, errors that are currently contributing to the loss of freedom for billions, and the death of millions of children.
You Can Assist in Correcting Deadly Inaccuracies
United Nations and member state officials have made inaccurate claims that benefit themselves and their funders at the expense of millions. For example, more children were being born into the world when the United Nations recognized a right to a healthy environment under policies that degraded their rights, than there were children protected by the United Nations under the right.
You can contrast claims made with metrics that quantify political equity and relative self-determination.
● Rules must be fair, first because they are inclusive of those impacted by them
● Human rights are the first rules
● The first human right is that which accounts for our creation, and the creation of power relations.
● Equity involves the binary inversion of the flow of influence, towards bottom-up inclusion and empowerment, towards self-determination. This is measured as an equal and influential share in democracy that limits manipulation, because each voice provides balance, creating a baseline.
This baseline sets a structure for the communal democracy to form and reform.
Thus, ask one question of anyone claiming to create value in the world. Ask them to account for children entering the world and any entitlements they should have, as key variables in the good the claimant claims to do. The question will show the individual or entity you are engaging with lost likely starts from a position of contradicting their claimed values and moving towards a future that harms many.
You can ensure legitimate entitlements and inclusive processes
There is no such thing as a legitimate entitlement that dose not flow from equitable, or measurably inclusive, political processes. That inclusion starts with birth and developmental standards. There is no authority to which one can cite to further demands for equity reforms because all United Nations authority derives from the logic of collective equity and self-determination, with the latter being physically impossible if not derived from the former.
Governments cannot entitle themselves, and those funding them, before they entitle their citizens with equal and democratic influence.
For years, the Fair Start Movement has advised leaders of these truths, and they have chosen largely to ignore benefiting themselves at deadly cost to others. The promise of sustainability is undermined by these deceptive tactics, which allow leaders to project a false image of environmental stewardship while continuing harmful practices.
Many of those willing to benefit at deadly cost to others want to treat the fact of children entering the world as something unrelated to their lives, an item on a menu of charitable choices. It is not. It is the base of all things, a commitment to who we should be - caring about rather than exploiting each other.
See the ease of assessing who truly backs equity, and the freedom it brings, versus identifiable barriers who are choosing to protect wealth at cost to millions of lives.
There are linguistic models for social change, like the gender pronouns and indigenous land occupation admissions we make in signature lines, that could correct fatal errors in human rights systems driving the climate and other crises we face and act as barriers to equity.
There is a relatively easy way to assess who is on which side of the necessary inversion, described above. Again, you can easily contrast what is said by anyone claiming to do good with facts regarding children entering the world on the day the statements were made, relative to concrete metrics like welfare, equity, capacity for democratic influence, the degradation of the ecological baseline needed to be free, levels of trust, and efficiency.
This will show those making the statements undercutting what they claim to value in order to themselves benefit – often at deadly cost to those others. Many United nations and member state officials, as well as wealthy funders in the United States, do not fare well under this assessment.
How to Act on Your Rights Now to Save Lives
1. Raise Awareness
Educate yourself and others about the importance of equity reparations, you can visit www.fairstartmovement.org to learn more. Share information through social media, community events, and educational forums to build public support.
2. Advocate for Policy Change
Join or support advocacy groups working towards fundamentally reparative justice.
3. Support Affected Communities
Directly support organizations and initiatives that benefit marginalized communities through financial contributions, volunteering, or participating in local development projects.
4. Engage with the UN
Participate in UN forums and events focused on human rights and equality.
Support our updated petition before the UN advocating for reparations.
5. Promote Inclusive Education
Advocate for and support the education of persons in marginalized communities to foster a greater understanding and generally promote education. Support Golden Love and Hands of Hope Foundation latest project on this.