Defence for Children International
United Nations Convention on the Rights of
the Child
From Declaration to ConventionThe entry into force of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on 2 September 1990 marked the culmination of nearly 70 years of efforts designed to ensure that the international community give proper recognition to the special needs and vulnerability of children as human beings. The first expression of international concern about the situation of children came in 1923, when the Council of the newly-established non-governmental organisation “Save the Children International Union” adopted a five-point declaration of the rights of the child, known as the Declaration of Geneva, which was endorsed the following year by the Fifth Assembly of the League of Nations. In 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved a slightly expanded version of that text, and went on to adopt a new Declaration, containing ten basic principles of child welfare and protection, in 1959. The 1959 Declaration which, it can be noted, has not been superceded, but only supplemented, by the 1989 Convention served as the springboard for the initiative to draft the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Government of Poland proposed this exercise to the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1978, presenting an initial text based essentially on that Declaration. The hope was that it could thereby be adopted rapidly during 1979, the International Year of the Child, as a lasting symbol of that Year. The Commission, however, felt that this text needed in-depth review, and set up a special Working Group the following year which carried out this task at annual meetings throughout the Eighties. The Working Group managed to come to consensus on the final version in time for the UN General Assembly to adopt it on 20 November 1989, the thirtieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Declaration. Although the Convention has been variously heralded or criticised as being a “revolutionary” document, it should be seen more as a major landmark in a continuing process of experience-gathering and reflexion over several decades in the sphere of human rights in general as well as in regard to children’s issues. For however progressive the provisions of the Convention may be, they are essentially the logical outcome of what is now a well-tried formula in the development of international standards: the setting out of basic principles, the gradual introduction of some of these into binding and non-binding international texts of wider scope, and finally their formulation in a coherent and special binding instrument. |
Rights
