ATTENTION TO CHILDRENS RIGHTS

Attention to Children's rights

Attention to Children's right

Introduction

Since the human rights commission started, its rightful duty to highlight individual rights, they also started to highlight the fact that children also were entitled to rights. A child is a child no matter where it belongs to. No country or state is allowed to rob a child of his/her rights.

Discussion

On 20 November 2010 the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) turned 21 years old, reaching a phase which - across several countries and cultures - is regarded as one of full legal capacity and, at least in a formal sense, full adulthood. These include the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), which in 2009, on the occasion of celebrating the 20th birthday of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child referred to the Convention as a 'revolutionary treaty that gave rights to all children everywhere (Birchard, 1998, p. 200).

After a brief reflection on the state of children's rights in the world today, this inaugural address elaborates an argument that the qualification 'revolutionary' is indeed justified in relation to the CRC. It will map out the extent to which this global human rights instrument has contributed to the aim of universalizing children's rights and explain what has been involved in this process. The ratification record and the content of the CRC, and the impact that it has had on legal systems will also be reviewed. This impact in turn often triggered and/ or strengthened policy-making efforts and various kinds of grassroots interventions in children's lives all over the world. All of this will provide ample material for making an assessment as to whether the Convention does indeed live up to the expectations linked to its coming of age, expectations of now being a fully-developed human rights regime.

Children's Rights World-Wide: Progress, Disparities and Regression

However, this is not as simple as one might think at first instance. Assessing and measuring human rights is a complex thing to do, for both practical and methodological reasons. Primarily on the practical side, relevant statistical data are often not available, unreliable, incomplete and/or lacking disaggregating, notably by age. Baseline information is often missing as well, which makes it difficult to develop credible assessments of whether or not human rights records have improved or deteriorated over time. On the methodological side, complications may arise in defining the human rights to be measured and in developing indicators. Most human rights problems have multiple causes, some of which interact dynamically with others. This makes human rights situational analyses and other measuring exercises complex and ambiguous undertakings. In addition to the problems of establishing direct causal linkages, it is also extremely difficult to attribute particular human rights outcomes or effects to specified actors or actions. Finally, the process involved in achieving the full realization of human rights is rather lengthy. This is not easily captured within the time constraints to which most human rights measuring exercises will be subjected (Bothwell, ...