The United Nations has called on the Governments of the world to increase budgetry provisions for programs benefiting children or to revise present priorities in order to consolidate and build on the results of the International Year of the Child, which officially finishes at the end of this month.

Australian Representative, Mr H.D. Anderson, at the United Nations thirty fourth General Assembly, said during the IYC debate: “IYC has surpassed all expectations reaching across national boundaries.

“Australia has sought to continue action initiated in the Year by funding projects from the normal Budget rather than a special allocation and sees considerable value in proposals for the exchange of child-related research between developed and developing countries and periodic reporting on national activities after IYC.

In this composite case study, the names and some details have been altered to protect the innocent, and the guilty.

Sue was nineteen years old and three months pregnant when she came into contact with a hospital. She had successfully concealed the pregnancy and claimed that she had only just realised her predicament. Referred to the social worker, by the time she got around to saying that she wanted an abortion it was too late. Adoption was explored, and she finally agreed, only to later change her mind. As the weeks went by, Sue, and her boyfriend, made no preparations for the birth, and neither of them talked about the expected child with any pleasure. The social worker discovered that both Sue and her boyfriend came from deprived backgrounds. Sue had been beaten and sexually assaulted by her father and was eventually made a State Ward after her father had died and her mother had claimed she was uncontrollable. Her boyfriend had had a history of psychiatric treatment and a criminal record for petty offences.

Anniversaries provide a convenient time to stop and look back on the event they commemorate, a time to take stock of what has been achieved and assess what remains to be done. November 20, 1979, will mark the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child. This year – the International Year of the Child – is particularly suited to this type of instrospection. IYC has put the spotlight on the situation of children all over the world and provided an impetus for child-related research. Drawing upon some of the statistics available, let us measure the rights the United Nations affirmed for children 20 years ago against the reality of their lives today.

The Project is based on a project conducted in Britain, where children in care were invited by the National Children's Bureau in London to attend a one day conference in 1975 to talk about matters of special concern to them. A group of children who attended the conference eventually published a book called “Who Cares? Young People in Care Speak Out” which reported on residential care as the children saw it. This book is locally available, and prompted the idea that a similar project might be carried out in New South Wales during the International Year of the Child. Information was sought and readily obtained from the National Children's Bureau in London about the “Who Cares” project.

Every year, but particularly in this International Year of the Child, many words have been spoken about children — their needs, their health and their happiness; and of the responsibility all must assume of seeing to it that young lives are nurtured.

The purpose of this paper is to examine an issue which pertains to the very survival of the child — safety legislation.

This year in Australia about a million children will be hurt and some thousands will die as a result of accident. What can be done to stop this epidemic? Does the law have a role to play?

In this the International Year of the Child the law relating to children's rights has come very much under scrutiny. I do not propose in this article to canvass the rights of the child under the Criminal Law but to examine the rights of the child in that area of the civil law which in these days of increasing marital breakdown, (at a rate from between 1 in 7 to 1 in 5 of every marriage in Australia) is most likely to affect him, namely under the Family Law Act.

I then want to postulate as to how those rights can be extended and improved both by statutory recognition as well as policy administration.

The increasing incidence of marriage breakdown in this country has resulted in greater numbers of children being involved in the social arrangement of access. Yet confusion and ambivalence are the usual responses to contact between the child and separated parent. Courts and the general community seem to hold the view that access is beneficial to children but such benefits are not clearly enunciated or understood.

The First Principle of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959) states that “The child shall enjoy all the rights set forth in this Declaration. All children, without any exception whatsoever, shall be entitled to these rights, without distinction or discrimination on account of … birth or other status, whether of himself or of his family”. Such a general expression of the desirability of equal rights for all children can be of little practical significance in the absence of positive laws to give substance to its spirit. The Declaration itself recognizes this in its Preamble, which calls upon “… national Governments to recognize these rights and strive for their observance by legislation and other measures”.

In its Second Main Report, Law and Poverty in Australia, the Commission of Inquiry into Poverty expressed the view that “legal representation for children appearing before the children's court, whether in the criminal or protective jurisdiction, is necessary if justice is to be done.”

This view coincides with the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in In re Gault. It has been said that this decision “unleashed a frontal assault on the juvenile court system.” It confirmed that juveniles were entitled to “due process” and the same protection which the Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights afforded to adults.

These three extracts come from Eight Theses of a Child's Rights (appended), compiled by a Swedish Professor of Law. A government committee considering children's rights is expected to recommend some of them for enactment into Swedish law.

The notion of legislation being required to ensure compliance with preventive health surveillance programmes in infancy, may with some validity, be questioned on the grounds that handicap in children occurs less frequently than in previous generations. Physical handicaps like the limb weakness which followed poliomyelitis which was prevalent 30 to 100 years ago are virtually unheard of today but there is evidence that there are, particularly in the lower socio-economic groups in our community, significant numbers of children with hidden, undiagnosed disabilities such as deafness.