Thirty years after the adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of the Child-which served as a guide for public and private action in favor of promoting children’s rights- the General Assembly of the United Nations approved the Convention on the Rights of the Child, (November 20, 1989) which became binding on September 2, 1990.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child considers a child to be any human being under the age of 18 years, and the Convention compiles the majority of the most important human rights of boys and girls according to the criteria of the sovereign state members of the UN.
The creation of documents in favor of children by the United Nations has been a long and laborious process. It took thirteen years to finalize the Declaration on the Rights of the Child and 10 years for the Convention. During these periods various challenges arose and differing interests had to be reconciled in order to achieve universally reaching texts.
Without a doubt, the Convention represents a great step forward, in that it contains the civil, social and cultural rights, without which one could not truly speak of a child as being subject to rights. The chief merit of the document is surely the obligatory and coercive nature it implies for the state which ratifies it, and the fact that it contains control mechanisms.
Convención sobre los Derechos de los Niños