UN member states have unanimously adopted a 21-point plan of action for the coming decade to improve the health and education of children worldwide and protect them from abuse and the threat of HIV/AIDS.
"I am enormously proud and pleased at what has been accomplished this week," said Ms Carol Bellamy, director of the UN Children's Fund UNICEF at the close of a three-day special session of the UN General Assembly last night.
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The plan was part of a 24-page document,
A World Fit For Children
, focussing on four priorities: promoting healthy lives; quality education for all; protecting children from abuse, exploitation and violence; and combating HIV/AIDS.
The special session was called to assess progress towards 10-year targets that were adopted at the first world summit on children in 1990, many of which remained unmet. The new plan set targets for 2010, notably to reduce by at least one third the mortality rates of infants and children under five, and of mothers after childbirth.
Even so, Britain's minister for children and young people, Mr John Denham, told the Assembly these were too timid to ensure the success of meeting the UN's Millennium goals of slashing child mortality by two-thirds by 2015 and maternal mortality by three-quarters.
Non-governmental organisations, for their part, criticised the statement of principles in other parts of the document, saying European nations had given away too much in negotiations with representatives of the conservative administration of US President George W Bush.
Delegates struggled to iron out difficulties over wording on reproductive health - which US officials said could be construed as abortion -- to the definition of the family, and even to capital punishment.
Ms Bellamy said UNICEF was "very comfortable" with the result. But, she said, a UN conference was "not a success or a failure depending on whether it has an outcome document; it is a success or failure depending on what happens after it."
The decade that followed the 1990 summit had seen some successes, including the near-eradication of polio, and some moderate progress towards goals such as a one-third reduction in mortality among children under five, she said. But 11 million children a year still die of wholly preventable diseases, and hundreds of millions still lived in great poverty, she added.
Ms Bellamy said the three-day session achieved much because it included about 300 child delegates, including two girls who made history on Wednesday when they became the first people under the age of 18 to address the UN General Assembly.
AFP