Universal Children’s Rights Day: today Google celebrates it with a Doodle for a specific reason

Google celebrates Universal Children’s Rights Day with a colorful Doodle today, Friday, November 20, 2020, an important date

Today, November 20, 2020, Google celebrate with a colorful Scribble the Universal Children’s Rights Day: the search engine has made the image visible on the home page in Italy, Austria, Ukraine, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, Ghanat, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and Malaysia.

The International day of the rights of the child and adolescence today is celebrated because On this day, in 1989, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the United Nations Convention for the Protection of the Rights of Children and Adolescents in the World (CRC: Convention of Children’s Rights).

196 countries in the world have ratified the Convention. In Italy, in particular, the ratification was carried out with Law No. 176 of May 27, 1991.
The Convention, composed of 54 articles and 3 optional protocols (on children in war; on sexual exploitation; on the complaint procedure) is a very important document that, for the first time, establishes, in a coherent way, the fundamental rights that must be recognized and guaranteed to children in all the world. world.

There are 4 i fundamental principles of the Convention:

• Nondiscrimination(Article 2): the rights enshrined in the Convention must be guaranteed to all minors, without distinction of race, sex, language, religion, opinion of the child / adolescent or parents.
• Major interest(Art. 3): in every law, measure, public or private initiative and in every problematic situation, the interest of the child / adolescent must prevail.
• Right to life, survival and developmentof childhood and adolescence (art. 6): States must use the maximum available resources to protect the life and healthy development of children, also through cooperation between States.
• Listen to the child’s opinions(Article 12): establishes the right of children to be heard in all decision-making processes that concern them, and the corresponding duty, for adults, to take their opinions into account.

The Convention also presents a control mechanism on the work of States, obliged to periodically submit to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child– body created by the Convention itself – detailed reports on the implementation of the rights of children and adolescents in its territory.

Italy presented between 1994 and 2017 four periodic reports on the implementation of the Convention (to which are added two relations on the application of the optional protocols), receiving the relative ones of the Committee Final remarks, which, in addition to recognition for progress, also contain recommendations for overcoming critical areas.

Alternative voices of civil society, such as i “Update reports” two years presented to the Committee on the Rights of the Child by the numerous Italian NGOs concerned with children, meeting in CRC working group, of which UNICEF Italy is an active part.