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Thematic Overview
1990 –1999
Recognizing Children’s Rights
1946 –1959 UNICEF -
The Agency for Children
1960 –1979
The Development Decades
1980 –1989
Child Survival and Development
2000 –
Children and Millennium Development Goals
see also
UNICEF Milestones by Year
Convention on the
Rights of the Child
On 20 November 1989, after 10 years of negotiation, the 159 UN
Member States unanimously endorsed the Convention on the Rights of
the Child (CRC), entering into force on 2 September 1990 –
representing the most rapid entry-into-force of any human rights
treaty. The CRC is the first legally binding international
instrument to incorporate the full range of human rights — civil,
cultural, economic, political and social rights, setting minimum
standards of protection for children everywhere against
exploitation, abuse and neglect. It is the most widely and rapidly
ratified human rights treaty in history, now signed by over 190
nations.
The Convention and the children’s movement assumed increasing
importance as the 1990s wore on. Like the 1948 Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, the Convention articulated something fundamental
about humanity’s sense of itself and established a reference point
for all future generations. Guided throughout by the principles of
‘non-discrimination’ and ‘actions taken in the best interests of the
child’, the Convention lays out in specific terms the social,
economic, civil, protection and participation rights of children and
the legal duties of governments to them. Children’s survival
development and protection are no longer matters of charitable
concern but of moral and legal obligation. Governments are held to
account for their care of children by an international body, the
Committee on the Rights of the Child, to which they have to report
regularly.
World Summit for Children
Building on the momentum of the CRC, the campaign for child survival
and development reached a peak in 1990. In September, UNICEF
convened the World Summit for Children, where 71 Heads of State or
Government took their seats at a World Summit for Children and 159
countries committed to a plan of action to ensure children’s
survival, protection and development. Children were to have a ‘first
call’ on society’s resources, in good times and bad, and their
rights were to be recognized and protected by the Convention on the
Rights of the Child. The commitments of the World Summit and the
Convention framed UNICEF’s work for the decade.
The joint signing of a World Declaration and 10-point Plan of Action
— including a set of child-related human development goals for the
year 2000 — was the pivotal achievement of the Summit. These goals
included targeted reductions in infant and maternal mortality, child
under nutrition and illiteracy, as well as targeted levels of access
to basic services for health and family planning, education, water
and sanitation.
The Summit was one of the most important moments in UNICEF's
history. It marked the moment at which children's issues reached a
high point on the international agenda. UNICEF's country offices,
guided by the Plan of Action, strove to ensure that every government
produced its own national programme of action (NPAs) for advancing
towards the 2000 targets.
Keeping the Promise
In September 1993, on the third anniversary of the Summit, the
United Nations Secretary-General convened a round table in New York
called Keeping the Promise to Children, which reiterated the
commitment to the Summit goals and endorsed mid-decade targets.
These include universal ratification of the Convention on the Rights
of the Child, and progress towards universal primary education, as
well as targets for the control of specific diseases and nutritional
deficiencies. By mid-decade, the aim was to have eradicated, or
reduced by a specified amount, neonatal tetanus, malnutrition,
polio, vitamin A deficiency, guinea worm disease and iodine
deficiency disorders, as well as diarrhoeal and vaccine-preventable
diseases.
The 20/20 Initiative
The funding strategy for attaining the goals of the World Summit for
Children was described as 'the 20/20 initiative'. This was a call
for developing countries to direct at least 20 per cent of their
budgets to basic needs, and for industrialized countries to earmark
20 per cent of their official development assistance (ODA) for the
same purpose.
The Progress of Nations
In 1993 UNICEF began publishing an annual report called "The
Progress of Nations", that report gathered the latest statistics on
countries’ progress in the key areas of health, nutrition,
education, family planning and women’s rights. Whereas in the 1980s
the key indicator for UNICEF had clearly been child mortality, in
the 1990s a broad range of indicators related to the well-being of
children and women were consistently monitored and targeted for
improvement.
Human-Rights based approach
It soon became apparent that there was a symbiosis between the
Summit goals and the Convention. When country offices pushed for
more action they could use a national government’s ratification of
the Convention as another lever; similarly, pressure to implement
the Convention would inevitably accelerate progress towards of the
Summit goals. Governments no longer simply had to be encouraged to
meet the goals for children; they could be reminded that they had a
legal obligation to do so. As UNICEF celebrated its 50th Anniversary
in 1996, the organization, spearheaded by the new Executive Director
Carol Bellamy, was fully embracing the human rights-based approach
to development, working to put the rights of children – particularly
the most marginalized and disadvantaged, who were most at risk of
exclusion from mainstream development and poverty reduction
initiatives – at the centre of the development agenda.
Child Protection
The Convention also established child protection as one of the key
arches of child rights amidst the rising tide of sensational media
stories about child exploitation during the 1990s. UNICEF placed
particular emphasis on reaching the most vulnerable children in
towns, cities, slums and squatter settlements, working closely with
mayors and municipal governments to place child rights on the top of
the local political agenda. The aim was to create ‘childfriendly
cities’, where urban children are provided with access to essential
services as well as sports and recreational facilities. During the
same year, UNICEF supported two major initiatives to protect
children: the World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation
of Children, the first international gathering dedicated to
combating this global problem, and the ground-breaking UN study on
the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children, by Graça Machel, a
specialist on children in armed conflict.
Anti-personnel landmines
UNICEF’s efforts to protect children from violence, exploitation and
abuse also included a decade long campaign to ban anti-personnel
landmines, which threaten children’s sight, limbs and lives in many
countries. In 1997, two thirds of the world’s nations signed the
Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production
and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, which
UNICEF helped draft and strongly promoted.
Child Labour
Additional attention was given to preventing child labour and
assisting children affected by it. In 1997, UNICEF joined other
participants at the International Conference on Child Labour in
adopting a global agenda for eliminating the worst forms of child
labour. Three years later, the organization helped 29 countries
introduce education programmes aimed at preventing child labour.
Partnerships
In an attempt to improve child survival levels, in 1992 UNICEF and
WHO developed the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI),
a new approach to healthcare that combines strategies for control
and treatment of five major childhood ailments that together account
for most deaths among children under five: respiratory tract
infections, diarrhoeal dehydration, measles, malaria and
undernutrition.
Throughout the 1990s, UNICEF continued to scale up its immunization
initiatives. In 1996, it joined WHO in publishing State of the
World’s Vaccines and Immunization, a review of immunization
progress, constraints and challenges for the future.
By 1998, UNICEF was providing vaccines and other support to polio
immunization campaigns in 97 countries, reaching 450 million
children, two thirds of the world’s children under five. As a
result, polio had been nearly eliminated worldwide – although its
complete eradication would remain elusive.
In 1998, UNICEF moved to the global forefront of combating malaria
by becoming a founding member of the Roll Back Malaria (RBM)
partnership, along with WHO, UNDP and the World Bank.
In 1996, UNAIDS was created, with UNICEF as one of the agency’s
co-sponsors. In 1999, UNICEF played a leading role in supporting HIV
prevention programmes in more than 20 countries.
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