Elizabeth White1; 1 University of the West of England, UK
Discussion
My paper will examine the role of the socialist bloc states in the initiation and drafting of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Child (UNCRC) between 1979 and 1989. Human rights became an area of direct conflict between Eastern and Western blocs during the Global Cold War as well as an area of Second-Third World cooperation. The socialist states regularly claimed that children had greater rights and better lives in their states and they took the lead on internationalising these rights, as they did with gender equality. Poland, supported by the Soviet bloc and post-colonial states, initiated the drawing up of the UNCRC in 1978, as part of the struggle over human rights with the United States in the later stages of détente during Jimmy Carter’s ‘human rights’ presidency. I will use materials from the Working Group of the UN Human Rights Commission which debated and drafted the Convention over a decade to reexamine the role of the socialist bloc in internationalising human rights in the later decades of the Cold War and its role in international institutions such as the UN, UNESCO and UNICEF.
