Meeting promises made a decade ago: 1990 World Summit for Children/2002 special session on children.

"We were all children once-and we are now the parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts of children". So states United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in his landmark report, We the Children: Meeting the promises of the World Summit for Children.

The needs of children are not "tricky"; they are not "hard"; they are not "thorny problems" to be politicized or obstructed. Children need and should expect a decent start in life. And we adults, once also children and perhaps parents ourselves, should be expected to do all we can to ensure that children and the generations to come inherit a fairer, safer, healthier world--a world with a better future. Isn't that what families throughout the ages have wished for and worked hard towards, with sweat and tears?

We the Children assesses the progress made in meeting the commitments of the 1990 World Summit for Children, which include best practices and lessons learned, obstacles to progress, and a plan of action for building a world that is fit for children to live in. The report is an adapted and abridged version of the Secretary-General's report, We the Children: End-decade review of the follow-up to the World Summit for Children, released in May 2001, a few months prior to when the special session on children was originally scheduled to have been held. That fall session was scuttled by an unforgettable act of terrorism on 11 September. One of the consequences was that the basic need of children for help at the highest political level and at the highest level of the family was postponed even further.

Some nine months later, leaders are again scheduled to meet in New York, from 8 to 10 May 2002, to begin working toward a better future for the youngest among us.

The special session of the General Assembly will bring together Government leaders and heads of State, non-governmental organizations, children's advocates and young people at the United Nations. The gathering will represent a rare opportunity to change the way the world views and protects children.

First, the special session will assess what has been achieved since the World Declaration on the Survival, Protection and Development of Children and its Plan of Action were adopted in 1990, soon after the Convention on the Rights of the Child had come into force. This international instrument has since been ratified by every country but two, and places children at centre-stage in the quest for the universal application of human rights. Two...