Marking the 20th Anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child
Posted by AlexT - 03/12/09 at 12:12 pm
This conversation-starter was provided by UNICEF UK.
In 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) became the first legally binding international convention to affirm human rights for all children. While great progress has been made on child rights in the past 20 years, much work remains to be done. The Commonwealth has an important part to play in ensuring that children’s rights are upheld and the CRC is implemented to create a Commonwealth fit for children.
In the words of Dan Seymour, Chief of the Gender and Rights Unit at UNICEF headquarters in New York “That the world fails to respect the rights of its children – even to deny that children have rights – is clear in the alarming numbers of children who die of preventable causes, who do not attend school, who are left abandoned when their parents succumb to AIDS, or who are subjected to exploitation and abuse against which they are unable to protect themselves. We cannot claim that the Convention has achieved what needs to be achieved. Rather, it has provided all of us with an essential foundation to play our part in changing what needs to be changed….This 20th anniversary of the CRC reminds us, most of all, of what we have left to do”.
Category : The Commonwealth's Relevance
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