Realities of Children’s Rights in Central Asia: A Comparative Study of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

An integral part of human rights norms are children’s rights. For many countries, regardless of the fact of having ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and other documents, the rights of a child continue to be violated. This study focuses on the implementation of children’s rights with the main concern to find out why in many regards similar countries differently implement children’s rights. This question was attempted to answer by conducting a comparative study of two largely similar Central Asian counties Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Starting with the historical past and ending up with the states’ recent economic performances, these two countries share much in common, however, in terms of children’s rights realization, which is the core of this study, a significant gap between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan is observed. Thus, this thesis is an attempt to identify the factors which cause these differences in child rights implementation in two selected countries. The general human rights approach to this problem was applied throughout the whole thesis drawing on Howard and Jack Donnelly theoretical concept of human rights and political regimes as well as Jutta Joachim’s concept of the role of NGOs in the human rights promotion by examining the question why, to what extent and under what conditions are NGOs able to influence state's interest. Political regime of a state being a significant factor influences the child rights implementation in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in a favor of Kyrgyzstan, however, as it was found out its not identical for all counties. Kyrgyz NGOs’ having more capacity, contribute to the more effective realization of children's rights in the country, unlike Tajik NGOs whose opportunities turned out as more limited.