Nevena Vučković Šahović
Nevena Vučković Šahović was a member and general rapporteur of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child from 2003 -2009. She is the founder and member of the Child Rights Centre in Belgrade (1997) and of the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights (1995). Nevena is a former Chair and expert on the UN Voluntary Fund for the Contemporary forms of Slavery (2014-). She devotes a great portion of her time to working with international organizations, particularly UNICEF, UNOHCHR and CoE, and is dedicated to fieldwork. She has taught at universities in Serbia, the UK, Netherlands, the USA, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Spain, Portugal and others. Nevena is currently teaching at the University of Oxford, Master’s in International Human Rights Law program. She is the author and editor of numerous articles and books.
Nevena was profiled for ATLAS by Kathryn Hampton, a human rights activist currently based in New York. Read more about Kathryn's work at the end of this profile, and follow her @Kathryn_Opal as she tweets about human rights protection for asylum seekers and migrants at the U.S. border.
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What motivated you to embark on a career in this field and what were your first steps?
After I finished university, I completed an LL.M. in human rights, taking as the topic of my thesis economic and social rights, especially the work of international labor organizations. By 1989, I was living in New York at the same time as the fall session of the UN General Assembly where States came together to adopt the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). I had already started asking myself which challenges I wanted to take on in my work, because social rights are quite broad. Seeing the adoption of the CRC, I thought, “This is it! I want to focus on the rights of the child. Finally there is an international treaty, but it will take years to put it on its feet and will need dedicated work.” Around 1992, I started working on my PhD dissertation on the international law on children, since I felt there was a lack of such expertise in my country and my region.
At the same time, I wanted to begin my own work into that area. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do that, but in an ironic twist of fate, the war which was beginning in my country gave me a new purpose and direction. I like to say that I am ‘grateful’ to former Serbian President Milosevic, because had it not been for him, I wouldn’t have been dismissed from my job at the time and wouldn’t have embarked on this path. In 1994, the resistance movement in Serbia started building up civil society, but I noticed that there was a gap, as there was no organization working on child rights. I decided to establish one. It was a long road of negotiating with donors and partners, but by 1997, I managed to fundraise and recruit staff in order to formally establish the first child rights center in the Balkans. Now the child rights center will celebrate its 23rd anniversary this year!
I also had small children at the time, and maybe being a mother myself was another reason that I became so passionate about child rights. With the wars in the former Yugoslavia, seeing children become victims was another strong motivation. I was relieved to see that, thankfully ,children in our region were not targeted for underage armed recruitment. That was something I had been concerned about, but was not the case in our region. Nevertheless, the rights of the children in the whole region started deteriorating, including education, health, access to justice, standard of living—everything just fell apart.
So that was how I got started in human rights law. I started civil society capacity-building through training in child rights. Strangely enough, the government was responsive to some of our advocacy initiatives, even though it was not a rights-respecting government generally. In the early stages we realized the importance of using international mechanisms, so as we published and disseminated information. We also initiated communication with international procedures.
Those were the first 10 years of my human rights career. I was deeply immersed in the rights of the child nationally and internationally, with NGOs, with universities, and with children themselves, which was very rewarding.
On a more personal level, the 90s were very challenging. My husband took on positions with the UN on other continents; I was building the Child Rights Centre; writing my PhD thesis; my mother fell ill and passed away, and I was alone with my two small boys. But somehow, I didn’t overthink what was happening, I just took action and pursued my dreams of a better world for children.
What were some highlights or turning points in your career thus far?
In 2002, my government (at that time the government had changed) nominated me for membership in the Committee on the Rights of the Child. By that time I had already finished my Ph.D. and begun teaching, and my child rights center was going well. From 2003-2009, in two terms I served on the CRC Committee. Being a CRC member was a huge highlight of my career: being on the Committee, one of 18 world experts, supporting implementation of the Convention in so many countries. I think that I have participated in the review of more than 150 states around the world. I started travelling even more and visited many countries in the course of that work.
The second highlight which I find very important is that I established a Master’s on the rights of the child in Belgrade, Serbia. For 7 years I was running a full Master’s on the rights of the child which had 7-8 students in every year. Altogether I had about 50 students, from Serbia, and also from Bosnia and Montenegro, which is a lot for our region. Knowing that there are 50 people with profound knowledge of children’s rights in such a small country, most of them still working on child rights, is very rewarding for me. Unfortunately my university decided that it was not economically viable to continue, but I am still active in a network of European Master’s in child rights which has more than 50 university members.
The third highlight was teaching child rights as an independent course. We started teaching a child rights elective in Nis, a city in southern Serbia, and we published a textbook that is still being used and is very successful. I also started guest teaching at the University of Geneva and then at the Master’s in International Human Rights Law at Oxford.
[At that moment in the interview, the phone began to ring from Montenegro…. A law school dean was calling to ask if Prof Vučković Šahović would assist in establishingmaster’s in child rights in Montenegro.]
Here is another a highlight! I am so excited about the possibility of establishing this Master’s. Human rights doesn’t bring a lot of money, but if you love this work, you get so infected that you can never stop being happy about it.
What are some of the challenges that you have faced in this journey?
A great challenge is the very slow progress in awareness of the rights of the child, what it means, and why it is necessary. We still live in a world that believes that we protect children because we are good and we are nice, not because they are entitled to protection. For me that has always been difficult.
Children are often treated as a minority, and discriminated against due to the mere fact that they are younger. They are very often defined by what they are not, and not by what they are. One colleague came up with a great term, he said that children are “not yets”. People say that children are “not yet” mature, strong, smart, etc, while not saying what children are. I wrote an article on the dignity of the child, pointing out that the child rights discourse still has a very strong protection orientation, rather than recognizing children as human beings with inherent human dignity, and therefore autonomy, will, integrity and worth.
It is not easy to equally attract all genders to this work. There are so many girls and women interested in our work and so few men. This is because child rights is perceived as a women’s job, except in a few areas such as family law and criminal justice. Another challenge in our world is that very often there are not resources for our work, not only financial resources, but also organizational and human resources. The only way to increase the available resources is to build stronger political awareness.
In spite of these challenges and slow process, when you work on these issues and then look back after 20, 30, 40 years, you can see that a lot has changed. Just consider the progress made on rights of women, people with disabilities, migrants, minorities. There are always challenges, but I think that it is so rewarding that it is worth it.
What is your advice for young people - especially women - who are seeking to work in international law?
My first piece of advice is on a personal note, for those who are parents or who would like to be parents one day. There is so much research and valuable data about child development and best practices in parenting for raising a healthy and happy child. I recommend taking advantages of all the resources which exist because our own personal family life is also a critical starting point for child rights.
My main message is: Get involved because the work is very rewarding. It’s not only about saving children, but also empowering children. Children today understand that they are not simply products of the expectations of their parents and society, rather, they are human beings with their own emotional and physical and spiritual life. If they have that knowledge, they can make decisions to formulate and follow their own dreams.
My next advice is: don’t just get interested and involved in child rights, but bring along others with you, because we need lawyers advancing the rights of the child, but also medical professionals, police, economists--we need all professions to deal with the rights of the child in order to make progress.
Dissemination of knowledge is crucial in making this happen. I am very passionate about dissemination of knowledge. Right now I’m involved in a pilot project in my country, a child rights elective which will be available in all teacher’s academies in Serbia. We still have a long way to go, since it is not a compulsory class yet, but that is the future. Without spreading knowledge about the rights of the child, we won’t see progress. Knowledge is the essence.
Last but not least, get involved in human rights and in access to justice in a broader sense, so as to ensure the rule of law in your community, your country and around the world. At the same time, you can do it without sacrificing your dreams of having a family, friends and good life. Just find a balance between work and the rest, since overwork will not make you a better expert; if you want it all – do it all and you’ll be good in whatever you do. This sounds more like a political speech but I believe in it. I have never worked for more than 6-8 hours a day on average. Sometimes I worked on evenings and weekends, but I always had time for my family, for fun, friends, good movies, books and culture. I believe that longer working hours only make you tired and less efficient and that it is possible to achieve a lot in 6-8 hours of work.
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Nevena Vučković Šahović was profiled for ATLAS by Kathryn Hampton, a human rights activist currently based in New York, who recently published a report on forced separations of migrant families by the US government, “You Will Never See Your Child Again”: The Persistent Psychological Effects of Family Separation. She previously worked for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and the International Rescue Committee (IRC), in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ukraine, Iraq and Turkey. She holds a Master of Studies degree (MSt) with distinction in International Human Rights Law from the University of Oxford. Follow her @Kathryn_Opal as she tweets about human rights protection for asylum seekers and migrants at the U.S. border.