A few weeks ago, I blogged the concern that if US courts follow international precedents, it could become illegal to homeschool your child, because some nations are using the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child as a cudgel to bash homeschooling parents as violating their children’s rights. We have evidence that this has already begun in Belgium to Paul Belien, who edits the Brussels Journal blog.
Yesterday my husband Paul Belien, the editor of this website, was summoned to the police station and interrogated. He was told that the Belgian authorities are of the opinion that, as a homeschooler, he has not adequately educated his children and, hence, is neglecting his duty as a parent, which is a criminal offence. The Ministry of Education has asked the judiciary to press charges and the judiciary told the police to investigate and take down his statement.
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It appears that the Belgian authorities are again considering prosecution—the second time in barely two months. This time the claim is not that my husband posted allegedly “racist” texts on this website but that he is failing his children.... The fact that a growing group of children seems to be escaping from the government’s influence clearly bothers the authorities. Three years ago a new school bill was introduced. The new bill refers to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and it obliges homeschooling parents to fill out a questionaire and sign an official “declaration of homeschooling” in which they agree to school their children “respecting the respect [sic] for the fundamental human rights and the cultural values of the child itself and of others.”
Again, don’t kid yourself that the National Education Association and certain other liberal activists aren’t salivating at the thought of using international law to force you to put your children in public schools where they can receive proper ideological indoctrination. We’ve even seen commenters on my blog advocating that very thing. The dangerous idea here is that families are merely a group of separate individuals grouped by arbitrary government mandate and that parents have no natural rights over their own children. Since family is the very foundation of society and civilization, the loss of the family is a grave blow to our future.
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