30th anniversary of UN Convention on the Right of the Child marked

A time to celebrate and a time to demand action for child rights. What will you do?

While most of the world’s parents at the time had grown up under dictatorships or failing governments, they hoped for better lives, greater opportunities and more rights for their children.

Yet poverty, inequality, discrimination and distance continue to deny millions of children their rights every year

we should also look ahead, to the next 30 years. We must listen to you – today’s children and young people – about the issues of greatest concern to you now and begin working with you on twenty-first century solutions to twenty-first century problems.

Childhood is changing, and so must we

Since its adoption 30 years ago, the milestone Convention of the Rights of the Child and its near universal membership has created “unprecedented international solidarity around children’s rights"

The Convention is the most widely-ratified international human rights accord in history; a landmark achievement which meant “for the first time, governments explicitly recognized that children have the same human rights as adults”

Since the Convention was born­, more children than ever before are receiving necessary protection and support: deaths of children under the age of five have fallen by half, and so has the number of children without adequate nutrition.

Despite positive trends in child rights, there is tremendous room for improvement; and actions must adapt to meet the new challenges children and youth face in the modern world.

you have the rights to health education and protection, you have the rights to make your voice heard, you have the right to a future

Looking forward, countries must invest in “those who carry the future forward”, and not only listen to children and young people, “but work with them to achieve the change they want to see.”

Let us support them, let us take action with them, and 30 years from now let us look back on this time as a time when the world committed, and put concrete programs in place to keep our promises to children and young people

Children have always been the first victims of war. Today, the number of countries experiencing conflict is the highest it has ever been since the adoption of the Child Rights Convention in 1989.

To abandon the aspirations of a whole generation is a terrible waste of human potential. Worse, creating a lost, disillusioned and angry generation of uneducated children is a dangerous risk that could cost us all.

UNICEF works with children who have suffered unthinkable traumas, gender discrimination, extreme poverty, sexual violence, disability and chronic illness, living through conflict and other experiences that place them at high risk of mental distress.

But for too many children, migration is not a positive choice but an urgent necessity – they simply do not have the opportunity to build a safe, healthy and prosperous life in the place they are born.

Every child has a right to a legal identity, to birth registration and a nationality. But a quarter of you born today – almost 100,000 babies – may never have an official birth certificate or qualify for a passport.

As an unregistered or ‘stateless’ child, you are invisible to the authorities – it’s as if you never existed.

There are more than 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24 in the world, one of the largest cohorts in human history. Too often, they lack access to an education that will prepare them for contemporary job and business opportunities – giving them the skills and outlook they need for a twenty-first century economy.

Just as the children of 1989 have emerged as leaders of today, you the children and young people of 2019 are the leaders of the future. You inspire us.