About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

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

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

profiles profiles most