Boys working in Dhaka. BBC World Service/flickr. (CC BY-NC 2.0)
From 14 to 16 November 2017, the IV Global Conference on Child Labour took place in the city of Buenos Aires. The conference was organised by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Government of Argentina, with the main objective to reach agreement amongst the ILO’s constituencies (governments, employers, and workers) on measures to attain the eradication of child labour in all its forms by 2025, as stipulated by Target 8.7 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As was the case for all the preceding global conferences on child labour, the participation of working children and working children’s movements was a highly debated subject in the run-up to the event.
Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) stipulates that children have the right to be heard in all matters affecting them. The obligation of signatory states to respect the views of children has been identified by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child as one of the four general principles of the CRC. The principle’s extension to global policymaking – for example, in the context of a global conference – was established during the UN General Assembly Special Session on Children (UNGASS), which took place in New York in 2002. Hundreds of children from all around the world participated in the Special Session during which the UN put in place the principle to respect the views and participation of children for the drafting of the global policy document ‘A World Fit for Children’. About the participation of children it states:
