RIGHT TO WORK
Enshrined in Article 32 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the right to work
provides for the obligation of the State to protect children from employment in work that endangers
their health, education or development, to set minimum ages for employment and to regulate the
conditions of employment. At national level, the protection of the right to work is ensured through
the provisions of Art. 43 of the Constitution of the Republic of Moldova, the Labour Code and
Article 11 of Law no. 338 of December 15, 1994 on children's rights.
As the children's representative before the public authorities, the People's Advocate for
Children's Rights asked the children about how they perceive the realization of the right to work
and further presents some of the children's opinions on the subject:
I would like to be able to combine school with work;
I worked for 2 months, this summer and they didn't pay me any money;
The working conditions to which I was exposed were very difficult;
My employer did not want us to sign an employment contract and I worked illegally.
The Children's Ombudsman mentions that the public authorities have failed to rectify the
situation in the field of respect for the child's right to work, on the contrary, following the
monitoring in the reported year, there is a worsening of the situation in the field.
Thus, the Republic of Moldova remains overdue in this regard in the context of nonimplementation of the Recommendations of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.
Likewise, the Children's Ombudsman's Recommendations on Ensuring the Child's Right to Work
were not implemented.
In her conclusions, the Children's Ombudsman notes the lack of an effective mechanism for
monitoring compliance with child labour law. Amendments to national legislation in the field of
occupational safety and entrepreneurial activity do not have an approach based on human / child
rights and this fact has generated situations of violation of human / child rights. Ambiguous
legislation is the cause of misinterpretations of the control powers of public authorities, which pass
the responsibility from one institution to another, in order not to assume assigned responsibilities.
That situation can be proved in the light of the case examined by the People's Advocate for
Children's Rights during this period, in which several systemic problems related to the protection of
the child employed were found.
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