More On Children's Rights

There is an interesting piece over at Normblog that follows up my earlier post on Unicef's "The State of the World's Children 2005". While I focused on the consequences of market dependence for the baleful condition of half the world's children Norm concentrates on the more philosophical dimensions of children's rights. He comments on some of the criticism (registration required) of Unicef's executive director, Carol Bellamy, and her supposed unwillingness to engage with the core issue of child survival. Norm then makes the simple, yet profound, argument that "survival must be focused on as, precisely, the most important of all rights" and goes on to say that

Rights, as it has been said, are trumps. We shouldn't treat the preservation and nurturing of children's lives merely as a desirable ideal. It is one of the most fundamental tests there is of the level of moral development of the global human community. The lives of children must be morally paramount.

Read the rest.