either directly, or through a representative or an appropriate body, in a manner consistent with the procedural rules of national law. (emphasis added)
Since the UNCRC is unenforceable unless it has been adopted into domestic law, the right to participation apparently made available by Article 12 is far from guaranteed. In addition to this, when children’s participation is sought it is generally an institution that initiates the opportunity for children to participate. Children who do participate in institutionally driven agendas often find the process tokenistic and in general cannot claim any representation for a wider group of children (Lyon 2007). Children are ‘typically recruited to participate in distinct ways on selected issues for the production of a particular kind of information’ (Kallio 2012: 85, emphasis in the original). Further, Article 12 limits participation to ‘proceedings affecting the child’ and this participation can be accomplished ‘either directly’ or ‘through a representative or an appropriate body’.
In 2012 the General Assembly of the UN adopted a third Optional Protocol to the UNCRC on a ‘communications procedure’. This allows individual children, groups of children or their representatives to bring complaints to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child about the violation of their rights as set out in the UNCRC and its Optional Protocols. These complaints, known in the language of the Optional Protocol as communications, can only be brought to the Committee if the complainants have already tried to get satisfaction at the national level. Although this instrument gives children a more direct route to the satisfaction of the rights set out in the UNRCR, it does not alter the fact that those rights are largely organized around education, health and welfare rather than classic political rights. Articles 13, 14, 15 and 16 (freedom of expression, religion, assembly and privacy) are the articles that are within the scope of classic political rights; however,
the role accorded to parents and others responsible for the child under Article 5 . . . suggests, in practice, that children’s enjoyment of these . . . rights may not be as expansive as that of adult-holders of similarly expressed rights under non-child-specific international human rights instruments. That is due to the fact that the exercise of civil and political rights accorded to adults under international human rights law is not linked to adults’ evolving capacities. (Nolan 2010, cited in Langlaude 2010: 38)
In the UNCRC and in the international declarations that foreshadowed it the child remains a special category of person who is entitled to protection from harm by virtue of their specific vulnerabilities. International law establishes who the child is: vulnerable and dependent but, at the same time, an emergent liberal citizen.
International development
Alongside the development of a body of international law aimed at child protection and, eventually, at the realization of child rights, the governing of childhood was extended globally through the transformation of what is now the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) into a global development agency. Like the 1924 and the 1959 legislation (and the 1989 UNCRC if we include the Cold War), UNICEF’s role in governing childhood came out of its role in protecting children after conflict. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRAA) was set up towards the end of the anti-fascist war in Europe and the Pacific to provide relief to war-affected populations. UNRAA had developed programmes to feed ‘children in need’ and support children’s health. When it was being wound up Ludwik Rajchman, the Polish UNRRA delegate and former head of the League of Nations Health Organization, argued successfully for the need for an agency to continue to provide aid for war-affected children (Morris 2015: 180). The UN General Assembly unanimously resolved in 1946 ‘to create the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) for the benefit of children and adolescents affected by war, for those receiving UNRRA assistance, and “for child health purposes generally” (UN General assembly 1946)’ (Morris 2015: 180). They were given the funds that remained with UNRAA to start this work. Continuing the mandate of UNRAA, UNICEF’s initial focus was on emergency assistance to women and children in Europe. Recognizing the continuation of child-saving frames in UNICEF’s work, Jennifer Morris notes that ‘Funding, procurement, and distribution efforts relied on the knowledge gained from these organizations [Save the Children and UNRAA] and built on a history of mother and child health and welfare care that had first emerged in the West from the Christian tradition in Europe that called for ministering to the poor’ (2015: 11). Children were ‘the easily acceptable humanitarian target’ (2015: 44). Maurice Pate, UNICEF’s first executive director, pushed the organization towards an agenda of economic and social development underpinned by child welfare. The framework of child welfare, though, was neither a charity nor an international welfare state but ‘an investment in the future’ (Morris 2015: 132).
The focus of UNICEF was gradually expanded to nutrition and medical relief, the latter bringing it into some conflict with the incipient World Health Organization. It moved into disease prevention and eradication work including mass child immunization campaigns. In 1953 the UN renewed UNICEF’s charter indefinitely. In response to neo-liberal shifts in development policy and its health impacts, UNICEF launched the ‘child survival revolution’ (Meier et al. 2018: 180) and continues to hold a prominent role in global health governance. UNICEF’s work conceptualized the health of children and disease prevention as fundamental to global development (2018: 181). UNICEF viewed itself ‘as a “catalytic agent” to advance both children’s health and a country’s socioeconomic development’ (2018: 182).
The UNCRC was adopted by UNICEF as the legal foundation for its work and child rights became central to its identity. The UNCRC specifically identifies UNCIEF as an implementing authority and in 1999 UNICEF adopted a human rights conceptual framework for its activities (Santos Pais 1999: 2). This framework aimed to combine meeting children’s needs with ‘the recognition and realization of their human rights’ (1999: 6). The aim was not only to deliver resources to children but to ‘intervene as advocates for children’. The framework paper that announced this new direction in UNICEF wanted to ‘place children at the centre of the development agenda’ (1999: 14).
Globalization has not only occurred at the level of increased international cooperation between states and increased financial flows. It has also involved a parallel shift below in both the movements of people and increased communication across national borders and the emergence of an incipient international civil society. The phenomenal growth in NGOs operating at the international level, or INGOs, is part of this emergent international civil society. International human rights law and particularly the UNCRC have played an important part in creating a role for INGOs and therefore stimulating their expansion.
In the UN Charter there is provision for consultation with NGOs. It has been claimed that this provision ‘has produced much of the international practice concerning NGOs, and the “rights” given to them’ (Breen 2003: 455). NGOs participated in the drafting of the Convention through their involvement with the Ad Hoc NGO Group on the Drafting of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (now the NGO Group for the Convention on the Rights of the Child). It was through this group that ‘NGOs had a direct and indirect impact on this Convention that is without parallel in the history of drafting international instruments’ (Breen 2003: 457, citing Cantwell 1992). The Convention is also the only international human rights treaty that expressly gives NGOs a role in monitoring its implementation (Breen 2003: 457).
Save the Children (SCF) established itself as part of the international governance of the ‘world’s children’ in 1924 when the Child Welfare Committee was created at the League of Nations and the then Save the Children International Union (SCIU) was given an advisory seat. In the same year the Assembly of the League of Nations adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child drafted by Eglantyne Jebb, the founder of SCF (Marshall 2004: 276). Their interest in ‘the world’s children’ as an object of concern caused the SCF and other philanthropists to turn their attention to governing childhood in the colonies. To this end in 1931 SCF convened the first conference on the African child. Two hundred delegates, including missionaries, social scientists, government officials and philanthropists,
