Too many children left behind: The inadequacy of international human rights law vis-à-vis the child

Abstract

The roots of the present human rights regime vis-a-vis children go back to the aftermath of World War I, when Eglantyne Jebb – cofounder of the Save the Children Fund – drafted, as part of her work with refugee children in the Balkans, a Children's Charter. In this document, she argued that there were certain rights for children that should be claimed and universally recognized and indeed that it was the duty of the international community to put such rights to the very forefront of their planning decisions: ‘[i]t is our children’ Jebb argued ‘who pay the heaviest price for our shortsighted economic policies, our political blunders, our wars’ (Hammarberg, 1990, p. 98). What Jebb in fact created was a practical document later used as the basis for the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child that was adopted by the League of Nations in September 1924 and that set out five precepts governing the ‘duties’ that mankind had, ‘beyond and above all considerations of race, nationality or creed’. These included allowing the child to be first in receiving relief in times of distress and providing all manner of support to the ‘needy’ child (defined at the time as being those suffering hunger and sickness, orphans and those who were ‘backward’ or ‘delinquent’). The language of the Declaration may have moved on, but it remains a landmark document in that it set the tone for many of the child's rights initiatives that followed, in particular, in terms of the ‘children first’ ethos that was to become a fundamental element in later child rights campaigns (Hammarberg, 1990, p. 98). Indeed, the 1924 Declaration has been widely depicted as a turning point for international political efforts relating to the child, and too for the advocacy movement that surrounds them, providing inspiration for many of the efforts on their behalf that were to follow. Like many of these subsequent efforts towards putting children first, however, political events overtook political will, and the attempt to improve children's lives at this time stalled as the world moved once again towards war. It would therefore be much later – in the aftermath of World War II, and following the 1948 approval by the UN General Assembly of the Universal Declaration – before the international community turned its attention once more to the welfare of the child, and it is in the work that was done during this time that the roots of the current international legal regime governing children can perhaps most clearly be recognised.

Citation

Watson, A.M.S. (2009), "Too many children left behind: The inadequacy of international human rights law vis-à-vis the child", Qvortrup, J., Brown Rosier, K. and Kinney, D.A. (Ed.) Structural, Historical, and Comparative Perspectives (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 12), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 249-271. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1537-4661(2009)0000012015