Translated by Amanda Moody
Mexico City - Justice Olga Sánchez Cordero, of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN), said that the State must ensure that the rights of children are given precedence over those of teachers, after members of the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CNTE) stopped giving classes.
Sánchez Cordero said that the Mexican State is obliged to ensure that the constitutional mandate which applies to all authorities is respected, because children have a right to be educated. She also insisted that the dissident teachers return to their classrooms in order to teach.
Interviewed in the Supreme Court of Justice, where the National Week of the Rights of the Child was inaugurated, Justice Sánchez Cordero said that all efforts should be made to give priority to the interests of children.
“The agencies of the State are obliged to defend and promote the supremacy of the interests of children and, above all, the fundamental rights of children as ‘legal persons’ with rights, not as incompetent persons because they have yet to come of age, but as full legal subjects. This is the great change, the great paradigm shift, the great parting of the waters in the history of the rights of children.
“They are not incompetent persons; they are absolutely full holders of rights, and this is how we must understand it: they are full legal subjects, they are not incompetent persons,” she said.Milenio: Should the rights of children be placed above the rights of teachers?
"The rights of children are above any other right. They are the citizens of the world and the future citizens of Mexico. They are the ones who are going to have great responsibility in the country’s future; it is important that our country’s children are given the educational tools, the basic tools to enable them to get ahead so that this country has decent, honorable men and women in the future."Justice Sánchez Cordero regretted that some children are co-opted into organized crime, due to their lack of a family structure, because they are thrown onto the streets.
She specified that looking after children is firstly the obligation of the family and that the State must then provide breadwinners with the necessary tools, such as day-care centers and spaces for infants and young people, so that children have other options and don’t find themselves in the street where they can be co-opted by gangs.
She reminded us that, since 1995, the Court has interpreted the rights of children, based on legal principles, in order to improve the protection of minors. Spanish original