Ritual Male Circumcision and Children’s Rights

In recent years, anti-circumcision activists have started to use children’s rights discourse in order to promote their agenda. For example, in 2013, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted a resolution and recommendation on the Child’s Right to Physical Integrity, which inter alia expressed concern that ritual male circumcision violated children’s rights protected by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; it urged Member States to consider forbidding the practice on children who were not old enough to consent and recommended inclusion of the child’s right to physical integrity into relevant Council of Europe standards. Concerns about the impact of this resolution on Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe led to the passing of a further PACE resolution on the Right to Freedom of Religion in 2015. The latter urges States to come to “reasonable accommodations” in relation to controversial religious practices, so as to ensure effective equality in exercise of the right to freedom of religion. The resolution specifically states that States should “provide for ritual circumcision of children not to be allowed unless practiced by a person with the requisite training and skill, in appropriate medical and health conditions” in order to ensure compliance with the rights of the child. These two resolutions reflect not only a divergence of approach as to the scope of the right to freedom of religion but also in relation to the question of whether ritual circumcision is per se a human rights violation. Against the background of the 2013 PACE resolution and other recent attempts to ban or limit the practice of ritual male circumcision, this chapter will analyze critically the various bases of the claim that ritual male circumcision violates children’s rights and show that the claims made by the anti-circumcision advocates are based on fundamental misconceptions in relation to children’s rights. On the contrary, it will be argued that a child born into a religion which practices ritual male circumcision has a right to be circumcised. For reasons of convenience, the chapter will refer to Jewish and Muslim boys since these are the main religions which practice ritual male circumcision, but the arguments apply equally to other religions in which circumcision is considered to be a religious precept.