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During IYC the Canadian Commission uncovered many problems related to Canada’s children. So did the national commissions of most other countries. The 1959 UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child, a noble document that had organized the themes for IYC, was clearly not the right tool for redressing the problems that had been brought to our attention — problems we were learning at last to recognize as abuses of children’s human rights and not just failures to meet children’s needs. So, in 1980, a UN working group was established to transform the Declaration into something with teeth, a legal document, an international covenant. This process, which included not only country representatives but also non-governmental organizations, produced a draft Convention on the Rights of the Child which came before the UN General Assembly in 1989. Canada was active in all parts of this process from negotiating the text to co-sponsoring the Resolution in the General Assembly. On November 20, exactly 30 years after adopting the Declaration on the Rights of the Child, the UN unanimously adopted the new Children’s Convention.
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