Promoting Child Health and the Convention on the Rights of the Child

Abstract

I want to fashion a thesis which will not commend itself to some, because there is a kind of breezy dismissal, underscored occasionally by an unwarranted contemptuousness, insofar as the rights of children are concerned, there is also some considerable jaundice and skepticism about international conventions generally-a tendency to see them as a kind of intellectual rigor mortis of the multilateral system. Nevertheless, I will make an argument. Let me use the Cold War as the context. It was impossible during the Cold War period to talk thoughtfully and rationally about rights. The western world promoted civil and political rights; the Eastern Bloc promoted economic, social, and cultural rights, and individual liberties were juxtaposed to the collectivist impulse. It was impossible to harmonize them; the positions were just too intransigent. Then the Cold War ended, and suddenly there emerged, full-blown in 1990, the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is the only binding international convention which fully embraces the principle of indivisibility. That is to say, every single right is equal: traditional economic, social, cultural, political, and civil. The rights to health and to education are equal in every respect to the rights to freedom of religion or freedom of speech. And these rights pertain to all children up to the age of 18, given the definition within the Convention itself. For an agency like UNICEF, the Convention was a kind of godsend. We had embraced the goals which emerged from the World Summit for Children in 1990, goals which were largely appropriate for health and largely generic: health, nu-