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Call for Kiro's Sacking

28 June 2006

Call for Kiro's Sacking

Family Integrity calls on the Prime Minister and the Minister of Social Development David Benson-Pope to sack Children's Commissioner Dr Cindy Kiro for continual abdication of duty.

"Dr Kiro's response to the violent deaths of the Kahui twins by calling for a ban on smacking is completely detached from reality," says Family Integrity's National Director Craig Smith. "She appears consistently incapable of seeing her duty as spelled out in the Children's Commissioner Act 2003."

The Act requires the Commissioner to have regard to three things: 1) the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCROC); 2) the views of children; and 3) the diversity of New Zealand children.

UNCROC says in its preamble that "the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth." Yet the Commissioner has chosen to ignore this directive and does nothing to stop the yearly 17,000 intentional killings of these children before their birth. Instead she is obsessed with banning smacking. What kind of twisted thinking considers a few smacked bottoms as more worthy of legislative action than the constant blood stained reality of thousands of dismembered babies' bodies?

Neither does the Commissioner regard the views of the unborn child while its parents and doctors and nurses are planning its death. Dr Kiro does not seek any professional advice on what these children's views might be nor seek to appoint advocates for these children. She has, however, publicly declared that she ignores them.

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These 17,000 aborted babies represent a very large diversity of children that the Children's Commissioner Act requires Dr Kiro to regard and that UNCROC Article 2 says she cannot ignore: "States Parties shall respect and ensure the rights set forth in the present Convention to each child within their jurisdiction without discrimination of any kind, irrespective of the child's....birth or other status." The child's pre-birth status is not to be used to discriminate against the child.

"Sadly, Dr Kiro appears both unable and unwilling to even consider the most helpless and innocent members of our society as persons worthy of her attention," said Mr Smith. "New Zealand's children deserve better than that. Dr Kiro deserves the sack."

ENDS

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