Convention on the Rights of the Child celebrates 31 years

The international community today, November 20, celebrates the 31st anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1989.

Inspiring a new way of looking at the rights of the child, the Convention has influenced in a decisive way the entire legal, social and technical edifice built in our country since the 1990s. The Convention establishes, for the first time, that children have their own specific rights and, for this reason, the State and the community must ensure that all children, without any kind of discrimination, benefit from measures that promote their healthy and safe development and, at the same time, protect them from risks and dangers that may compromise their physical, psychological and emotional development.

The pandemic that rages around the world has had very serious impacts on the realization of children’s rights all over the world. On the one hand, it has accentuated the serious problems of material deprivation that existed before the pandemic crisis and which lead international organizations to estimate that by 2020 alone a further 150 million children in 198 countries will fall into poverty. At the same time, child labor, which has been shrinking worldwide for 20 years, will increase worldwide by the year 2020. On the other hand, the necessary measures of social distancing and confinement have had relevant impacts on the socialization processes and the educational path of children and young people, for whom political agents must be especially attentive in the search for solutions to overcome them.

On this date, it is recalled that the Ombudsman’s Office has a telephone line specially dedicated to children. The Children’s Line has focused on providing information and referring complainants to the institutions that, in the field, are competent to act, but in some cases there is direct intermediation between complainants and target entities and the monitoring of the actions of these entities, especially the Commissions for the Protection of Children and Young People, the Multidisciplinary Teams to Support the Courts and schools.