Statement by the Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography at the High-level meeting of the General Assembly on the 25th anniversary of the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child

New York, 20 November 2014

Mr. President,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Twenty five years ago, the United Nations offered a wonderful gift to children around the world: a treaty which recognised them as rights holders. The message was loud and clear: children are not mini human beings with mini human rights.And 194 countries followed suit by ratifying it with a promise to respect, protect and empower children.

Since then, many measures are contributing to keep that important promise alive. They include the adoption of new laws, policies and actions plans, the provision of assistance and protection services, the establishment of child participation mechanisms, the organization of awareness raising campaigns and the development of corporate social responsibility.

Despite all these efforts, 25 years later, children have many reasons to feel impatient, and even angry. In 2014, there are still people who sell and buy children, who exploit them and dispose them as commodities. This is a blatant denial of the child’s human dignity. Allowing this to happen equals to betraying children and seriously compromising our chances to prosper as a society.

Several forms of sale and sexual exploitation of children have considerably worsened since 1989. The development of ICTs has made it much easier for criminals to produce, share and storage child abuse images in full impunity. Estimates indicate that the number of child abuse images online runs into the millions and the number of individual children depicted is most likely to be in the tens of thousands. The age of victims has tended to decrease and representations are becoming more graphic and violent.

Child prostitution is still a prominent problem in many countries.

The root causes of child prostitution have multiplied in recent years. They include early sexualization and the dissemination of sexualized images of children, violence and peer pressure. The so-called “child sex tourism”, a critical aspect of child prostitution, has also increased, driven by the overall growth of tourism, the almost inexistent prevention measures and an inadequate criminalization of offenses. Children are also being sold and forced into marriage.

Although it has become less and less easy to illegally adopt a child, the demand for adoption has continued to increase. This creates the conditions for a lucrative business which results in abuse, corruption and excessive fees amounting to the sale of children. The sale of organs is another form of abject business which finds its victims amongst the most deprived and vulnerable of children.

Today, more children are at risk of sale and sexual exploitation than was previously the case. On one hand, there is an increased vulnerability of children to sexual exploitation, linked, to poverty, humanitarian crisis, underdevelopment, inequality, social norms, and broken or dysfunctional families. On the other hand, there is an increase in the demand for sex with children, which is coupled with the transnational dimension of the phenomenon.

So: Coming back to the question: Is the world a better place for children? I would say “it depends”. For the most vulnerable children, the truth is that the world continues to be a labyrinth filled with traps and monsters with few places to hide and nobody to turn to for help. In the particular case of the sale of children, child pornography and child prostitution, the important efforts made through legislation, policies, campaigns and international cooperation have not succeeded in putting an end to these very serious problems. However, I have no doubt that, if applied and respected, the principles and rights enshrined in the Convention would completely change the pattern, benefiting the children who were left behind and solving the pending problems. For this to happen, we need political will, public awareness and a concerted and continuous effort.

The current negotiations around the post-2015 development agenda offer an extraordinary opportunity to make a real breakthrough in the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. We need specific goals and targets to promote children’s rights and protect them from any form of abuse, violence and exploitation and based on related human rights obligations. We also need to set clear indicators to assess progress, and to ensure accountability and equity as implementing principles, at the global and the national level, as well as of state and non-state actors. And more importantly, we need to grant children a central role in the development and the monitoring of the implementation of the human rights-based approach to the post-2015 development agenda.

And throughout the process, we need to involve and empower children as the best possible experts when it comes to determining their needs and wishes.

The Information and Communication Technologies offer manifold opportunities and tools to ensure the participation and empowerment of children in the design and implementation of prevention and protection strategies. Children are eager to use ICTs and we need to encourage them to exploit their creativity, their capacity to innovate and their willingness to communicate, turning ICTs into a powerful tool for the defense of children’s rights and the expression of children’s agency.

Next year, the Optional Protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography will celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of its adoption – a good occasion to go beyond rhetoric and take stock of progress since 2000, reflect on ways to bridge implementation gaps, and make a strong call to gather the necessary effective support for making the prevention and eradication of sale and sexual exploitation of children a reality.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Young people,

Despite the dark picture I have just painted, I still believe that we have at least 2.2 billion reasons to celebrate. As many reasons as children in the world. And we also have at least 5 billion additional people who can be mobilized to improve the world.

So: When we’ll blow out the 25 candles today, instead of making a wish, I would like to invite you to do something else. I would like you to take a decision: What are YOU going to do NEXT to make the world a better place for children?

And to remind you of your decision, here you have a beautiful poem by Robert Frost:
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

I thank you for your attention.