Champion of children’s and women’s rights, First Lady Suzanne Mubarak hosted the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) conference on February 19, focusing on cyber safety and heralding Egypt’s recent efforts to improve child protection laws.

The Suzanne Mubarak Women’s International Peace Movement, a non-profit, non-governmental organization that Mubarak founded in 2003, co-hosted the event in Cairo, which several speakers hailed as a symbolic step for the Middle East, a region that has often remained silent about child abuse and exploitation.

“This is a fantastically new meeting because we were in America, we were in Europe and suddenly the Middle East is here,” ICMEC Chairman Baron Daniel Cardon de Lichtbuer told an audience of about 200 at the JW Marriott Cairo. “The Arab world is here in the room and is visible [] It is a superb historic moment.”

Mubarak welcomed fellow ICMEC honorary board members including Margarida Sousa Uva Barroso, wife of the European Commission president; former First Lady of France Bernadette Chirac; Valentina Matvienko, governor of Saint Petersburg, Russia; Princess Lalla Meryem of Morocco; Belgian Queen Paola and Sheikha Sabeeka Bint Ibrahim Al Khalifa, wife of the king of Bahrain, to the honorary board’s third meeting since its inception in 2004.

Crossing Borders to Protect the Children of the World was both the title of the conference and the goal that the first ladies, highnesses and other leaders hoped to embody.

“The judiciary is trying to strengthen the implementation and enforcement of international law, but still much more needs to be done,” Mubarak said. “Law enforcement officers are collaborating to find missing persons and bring down child pornography rings, but much more still needs to be done. NGOs are providing vital support to abused, neglected and at-risk children, but more needs to be done. The IT sector continues to break boundaries in innovation, making the internet a safer place through the development of safety tools, filtering and rating systems, but much more still needs to be done.”

Speakers congratulated Mubarak on her efforts with her NGO and on Egypt’s recent amendment of the Child Law (law number 12 of 1996). Last year, amendments to the law outlawed female genital mutilation, increased the marrying age from 16 to 18 years old and established child protection committees to rule on child abuse cases — punishable by fines or prison sentences — in each governorate, among other changes.

The amendments, part of a package proposed by the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM), chaired by Mubarak, have been criticized for being both too invasive and too weak.

According to a NCCM official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as she was not authorized to speak on the topic, the NCCM, the official body dealing with women’s and children’s issues, has had the approved legislation since June but is still in the process of contacting authorities involved in implementing the law including the Ministry of the Interior before it can issue the executing order that will allow police to enforce the law.

Hany Helal, head of the Egyptian Organization for the Rights of the Child (EORC), says that while the law has philosophically improved child protection on both a social and legal level, it is unclear how efficiently it will be enforced until the NCCM issues the executing order and police and prosecutors begin implementing the law.

“There is training for police officers to get them more used to applying the child law in general, but in my opinion, the Egyptian police are not qualified to deal with children and this is why we demand limiting the role of the Ministry of Interior in child issues,” says Helal, suggesting that young criminals and victims should be referred to social organizations, not dealt with by the police.

The 2008 amendments to the law also made the possession of and involvement in child pornography illegal. Egypt was one of seven countries to pass child pornography legislation after an ICMEC review in 2006 found that 93 of 187 Interpol-member countries had no laws against child pornography. Of the countries that did have legislation, many did not define child pornography or criminalize its possession.

Based on a survey conducted in the United States, one in five girls and one in 10 boys are sexually victimized before age 18, and approximately one in seven children between 10 and 17 years old receives a sexual solicitation over the internet, according to the US-based National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

And while online child pornography may not be Egypt’s most pressing child-related problem, children here are becoming more exposed to the internet through cyber cafes, which Helal says should be supervised or at least have guidelines to protect their young users.

The Suzanne Mubarak Women’s International Peace Movement and the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology launched a Cyber Peace Initiative in 2007 to study ways to make the internet safer for children, create safety curricula for educators, and encourage local youth to use the internet to promote peace.

As part of the Cyber Peace Initiative, Net-Aman (Net Safety), a group of 11 young adult volunteers visits libraries, schools and community centers around the country to distribute the organization’s literature to parents and teachers. The volunteer encourage and show them how to talk to their kids, who are typically more computer savvy than their parents, about safe internet use.

“We want to outreach and impact all young people and children in Egypt: those who are accessing the internet readily from home, those who are accessing the internet from cyber cafes, those who are accessing the internet away from the supervision of their parents [] those who might be unwittingly putting themselves at risk and also those who are intimidated by the internet and therefore losing out on a myriad of opportunities,” said Ahmed Rashad, co-leader of the Net-Aman team and a telecommunications solutions engineer for Nokia Siemens Networks.

Presenting statistics from the US, Barroso highlighted surveys suggesting that children whose parents do not talk to them about internet safety do not believe posting pictures and personal information is unsafe and do not tell their parents when they are contacted by strangers online.

“This data makes one thing quite clear to me: that the digital age has not made parenting obsolete, quite the opposite,” said Barroso, encouraging parents not to be intimidated by the internet and to limit the time their children spend online, set rules and explore the internet with their kids.

“Even if children seem to know more about these new technologies than some of their parents will ever know, this does not mean that they are mature enough to handle the internet without their guidance,” she said.

Microsoft, one of the Cyber Peace Initiative sponsors, has helped create an international Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography, bringing together financial and internet leaders to track the flow of funds in the child pornography industry to shut down the accounts of illegal enterprises. The company has also helped ICMEC and Interpol train police to investigate cyber crimes.

“Child pornography has become a multibillion-dollar industry. How is this possible? How did we come to that?” Mubarak said with an incredulity echoed by many of the conference speakers, who lamented the lack of statistics available outside of the US. “In the face of this dynamic, I am encouraged to see the progress made with some of ICMEC’s initiatives including the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography and I hope we can start one in our region soon.”

Short on specifics about future goals, the honorary board released a Cairo Declaration, which urged global leaders to enact new improved legislation and periodically review existing laws, join ICMEC in building regional centers to address child exploitation and abduction, and build awareness of the issue, among other priorities.

Reiterating a line she often uses, Mubarak closed the event by saying, “This has not been just a talk show, these are not just speeches that have been given; these have been actual facts about very hard work that has taken a lot of energy and a lot of input from many, many dedicated people.”

The ICMEC honorary board also includes former US First Lady Laura Bush, former Russian First Lady Lyudmila Putin, and Queen Silvia of Sweden, all of whom did not attend the event.