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575 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (2001)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0575 and id is 1 raw text is: Children's Rights: Beyond the Impasse Nonetheless, if the fundamental rights behind our cause are not sufficient to move people to act, then let it be the economic and social rationale behind it. Either way, we are going to challenge people to act. -Nelson Mandela and Graga Machel' The ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) by a majority of the International Labor Organization's member states techni- cally affirms that children are born with fundamental freedoms and the inherent rights of all human beings (UNICEF 2000a, 2) and so should have marked the twentieth century as a century of hope for those children whose fundamental rights are violated across the world. There is, however, wide- spread concern that, notwithstanding manifold successes in enlisting broad- based societal commitments to safeguard children's rights, there exists nei- ther a universal consensus on the meaning and content of the very concept of children's rights nor sufficient reasons for us to be content with the current status of children's rights worldwide. For instance, the Report on the State of the World's Children notes that for all the gains made, the story of the 20th century is also about failed leadership-a lack of vision, an absence of cour- age, a passive neglect of their rights, as set forth in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNICEF 2000b, 3). The widening of the gap between expectations and achievements in the area of human rights raises a fundamental issue: how comfortably does our commitment to children's rights fit with our convictions about social justice? It appears that the current demands for safeguarding various rights have lit- tle to do with any comprehensive plan for a new and more just economic and political order, despite the fact that ideals of freedom inevitably entail notions of distributive justice. Although no signatories to the CRC, international donor agencies, or child rights advocates would deny that the present system of distributive justice is mainly responsible for the vulnerability of children, they ultimately shy away from a serious dialogue about alternatives to it. Even as evidence of the violation of children's rights multiplies at an alarming rate-pointing to the wholesale failure of policies, programs, inter- ventions, and conventions designed to curb these violations-the world remains divided over the fundamental question of what constitutes basic human rights (Ray 1998). We do not even have the language that might grant meaningful agency to children. There seems to be an impasse in the praxis of the discourse of children's rights, where praxis is, in the words of Paulo Freire (1986), the precise symbiosis between reflective action and critical theoriz- ing where critical consciousness functions as the motor of cultural eman- cipation (6). The reason for such an impasse, according to Fedric Jameson- echoing Francis Fukuyama's notion of the end of history-is that in the 8

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