How Things Changed.

• Author: Newman-Williams, Marjorie

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...