Speech: Adolescent Rights: What Progress? by Anthony Lake, UNICEF Executive Director at the Harvard Conference on Adolescent Rights

Plenary Session: The Social and Political Costs of Inaction
FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University
Boston, 8 December 2011

Extract:

The coming of age of the Convention on the Rights of the Child is the ideal time to reflect on the generation of adolescents who have grown up under its auspices … to take stock of progress made in improving their lives … to consider how we can build on that progress … and to confront what could happen if we do not.

The CRC was and is a milestone in promoting the welfare and protection of children everywhere.  It has been more quickly and widely ratified than any human rights treaty to date – and it will be even more effective when it is universally ratified.   I hope sooner rather than later.

The CRC is the foundation of all our work at UNICEF: It provides our mission and our mandate.  The rights of children and our emphasis on equity, in all our advocacy and programs around the world, are inseparable.  Because to the degree children are disadvantaged – for reasons of geography or gender or ethnicity … or because they live with disabilities or disease … or are stigmatized and bullied for any reason – to exactly that degree, their rights are being violated.

So let me here sketch out two propositions for our discussion.

First, that sustainable, tangible progress in children’s global welfare depends – in practice as well as in principle – on a focus on equity.

Second, more broadly, and tentatively, that we should not only advocate for policies that promote equity as an outcome of economic growth, but also –conversely – we should make the case that promoting equity helps produce sustainable growth, a proposition that is supported by a growing body of evidence. …

Full text here: http://www.unicef.org/media/media_60917.html