Art Exhibition “Too tall to overlook”

Mr. President,
Ambassador Tichy-Fisslberger,
Ladies and gentlemen:

A warm welcome to today’s opening of the exhibition “Too tall to overlook”. The Director-General very much regrets that he cannot be here today and he sends his best regards. He has asked me to deliver the following remarks on his behalf:

Ladies and gentlemen,
Throughout human history, children have suffered tremendous violations of their most basic human rights. But since 1990, overlooking their rights has become a little harder. That’s the year when the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child entered into force. It changed the way children are viewed and treated, recognizing them as human beings with a distinct set of rights instead of passive objects of care and charity.

The Convention has found overwhelming support from UN Member States. It was one of the most rapidly and widely ratified international human rights treaties in history.

Much has been done to advance the implementation of the Convention over the past 27 years, especially here in International Geneva, thanks to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and to UNICEF, two strong advocates for the rights of the child.

And this work has generated results. Around the world, Member States have adjusted their legal frameworks, their policies and budgets in response to the Convention.

In 2015, as we took stock of the achievements made in the framework of the Millennium Development Goals, we found that:

• 53 percent fewer children died before their fifth birthday than did in 1990
• The overall number of children out of school had declined from 100 million in 2000 to an estimated 57 million and
• The rates of primary school attendance for girls had become equal to boys in many regions across the world.

But, we were also urgently reminded that much remains to be done. Services and rights continue to be denied to children from minority groups, to children with disabilities, to indigenous and stateless children, and in particular to the girls who belong to these groups. The worsening of the global migration and refugee crisis has created new vulnerabilities, meaning that the rights to life, dignity and development have been denied to many of the 26 million children currently displaced by conflict.

And children in the developing world are not the only ones to face such challenges. UNICEF has found important inequalities in child well-being in developed countries as well, including gaps in educational achievement, health and employment opportunities. Such inequalities must be addressed both at national and global levels. Reducing inequalities is written into the DNA of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child thus becomes part of our larger project, the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In this Agenda, our common road map for humanity, we have vowed to leave no-one behind, no man, no women, no child.
To make sure that we live up to our ambition, we now have ten giants watching over us. I thank the Youth Ambassadors from Austria, the creators of these giant figures, who will also be available today to explain to us the sculptures and what they stand for.

My special thanks go to Austria for bringing this powerful and unusual exhibit to the Palais des Nations and for giving us a reminder about children’s rights that will be hard to overlook.

Mr. President, your presence underlines the importance Austria continues to pay to the rights of children. Thank you for being with us today.

Thank you all and please enjoy the exhibition.