Yesterday, November 20, 2009, was the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Convention, adopted by the UN General Assembly on November 20, 1989, and ratified by Australia, restated positions taken by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, concerning the “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” and how “the UN has proclaimed that childhood is entitled to special care and assistance”.

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The situation of the world’s children has, in fact, improved slightly during those last 20 years, although the facts remain unbearably tragic.

The UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), in its latest State of the World’s Children report, reveals that “only” eight million died before their fifth birthday in 2008 (twenty years ago the figure was 12.5 million).Four million died from preventable diseases like diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia.

One billion children still lack at least one essential service, such as health care, education, clean water, sanitation or adequate shelter. More than 100 million do not attend primary school. 22 million do not receive regular immunisations. 150 million are forced into labour. 1.2 million are trafficked each year.

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So is there still something fundamentally wrong with our attitude to children?

The Convention on the Rights of the Child asserts: “States Parties recognise that every child has the inherent right to life” and that “the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth”.

Before birth?

Senator Gareth Evans, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, assured the Senate on October 26, 1989 that the Australian Government understood that the reference to the rights of the child “before as well as after birth” did not preclude abortion.

Ho hum.

So what is a child? What does a child have to do, or be, for us to accord him/her the “rights” about which we prattle so much . . . ?

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Once again, as always, an important matter of principle means nothing if we do not discipline ourselves to treat it as a religious matter.

Leave God out of the “rights” debate, and we end up according rights only to those whom we find convenient and/or cute to have around.

One might seem to be a spoilsport to mention this fact.

But while we turn a blind eye to the supernatural aspects we get more or less nowhere, and the little corpses keep piling up.

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