How Things Changed.

It was just over 10 years ago, in December 1988, under the able chairmanship of Professor Adam Lopatka of Poland and with unique participation from the non-governmental organization (NGO) community, that the United Nations Working Group on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) completed the drafting of a historic human rights treaty for the protection of children's rights. With the "Best Interest of the Child" as a core and forward-looking principle, this Convention became the first legally binding human rights treaty to fully embrace the same holistic vision which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had established 40 years earlier.

It took 10 years, from 1978 to 1988, to transform the Polish proposal, based on the 1959 Declaration on the Rights of the Child, into the final text that was adopted without a vote by the General Assembly in 1989. Greatly influenced by the well organized and technically competent Ad Hoc NGO Working Group, the drafters of the treaty successfully reintegrated civil and political, economic, social and cultural rights into a single treaty for the protection of children's rights.

Equally significant is the fact that this treaty was the product of a significantly enlarged United Nations, whose membership in 1988, compared to 1948, reflected the true diversity of the world's religious, social, economic and cultural traditions. It had also taken the innovative step of naming the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)the very pragmatic and operational children's agency of the United Nations-as having a special role among other UN bodies in the implementation of this Convention.

This role did not come easily to UNICEF. Like other development agencies of the United Nations system, UNICEF's traditional concern with the survival and basic needs of children seemed at odds with concerns for human rights. Many in the organization were convinced that human rights and development were not a good mix. The normative processes of treaty bodies and the stark divisions created by the cold war between civil and political rights, and economic, social and cultural rights had convinced UNICEF that its programmes of cooperation should be best kept separate from the polarized world of human rights.

It occurred to very few people in 1989 that the Mission Statement, adopted by the UNICEF Executive Board in 1996, would one day proclaim: "UNICEF is guided by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and strives to establish children's rights as enduring ethical principles and international standards of behavior towards children."

During the 1960s and 1970s, UNICEF had watched UN human rights bodies become increasingly paralyzed by the politics of the day. Their original mission to protect people's right to peace and security, their human dignity and inherent equality seemed at all tunes to run a distant second to political bloc interests. In UNICEF's view, at the time, its involvement in politically charged activities such as the drafting of a human rights treaty could compromise the organization's tradition of impartiality and jeopardize its ability to work for needy children everywhere and with all sides in a conflict.

To the frustration of some Governments and many in the NGO community, UNICEF treated the Working Group on the CRC with benign neglect for several years. But undaunted, the NGO community and a few staff working with very modest financial resources campaigned relentlessly between 1978 to 1986 to convince UNICEF that its full engagement was important for the realization of children's rights and for the quality of the new Convention. UNICEF's accumulated knowledge and considerable practical experience were seen as an important resource for the drafting group. From the NGO's longer-range perspective, UNICEF's. involvement in the application of this Convention, once it was adopted, was equally important and they led the campaign to include specific references to UNICEF in the implementation articles of the Convention.

The UNICEF Executive Board weighed these arguments and in 1986, under the Chairmanship of Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury, Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to the United Nations, adopted the first of a series of decisions directing the UNICEF secretariat to become more actively involved in the drafting process and to facilitate the early adoption of the proposed Convention. By 1987, UNICEF was fully engaged, putting its considerable organizational resources to work for the adoption of the CRC.

At the United Nations in New York and Geneva and in capitals around the world, the importance of the new Convention for children and to those who work for them was beginning to be understood. The active involvement of previously absent developing countries in the drafting process was one of the important results of the organization's engagement. UNICEF facilitated consultations in developing countries, reached out to the mass media, helped members of the UN Working Group to better understand the issues that were of major significance to poor children in developing countries and organized informal meetings that facilitated consensus on a range of difficult articles.

When the new Convention was adopted in the General Assembly in 1989, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, UNICEF and a global partnership of NGOs encouraged Governments to support its early entry into force. The 1990 World Summit for Children also called on Governments to promote the earliest possible ratification and implementation of the CRC, and by 1991 the Convention had become part of the body of binding international human rights treaties with the required 20 ratifications. Rapid ratifications continued and by 1995 all but two States - Somalia and the United States-had made the legally binding commitment to uphold the principles of the CRC, making it the treaty with the most adherents within the shortest time-frame.

For UNICEF, the greatest challenge has been the effort to fully grasp how the principles of the CRC should guide programmes of cooperation for children. Promoting public awareness of the Convention, helping countries to revise legislation, and briefing the Committee on the Rights of the Child on the range of challenges children face and how difficult implementation can be for poor countries have been far easier than learning how to develop programmes for children from a human rights perspective. But in 1998 UNICEF issued guidelines for staff on programming for children and women from a human rights perspective, based on the experience of several pioneering country programmes that are teaching the organization how human rights and human development mutually reinforce each other.