Geneva Declaration
The Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted by the League of Nations in 1924, was the first international statement to say that children have special rights and that adults carry responsibilities toward them. It was short and non-binding, but it set out a principle that later shaped the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The declaration grew out of the devastation of the First World War, which left large numbers of children orphaned, displaced, or starving across Europe. Relief work in the war's aftermath, including famine aid in central and eastern Europe and later in Russia, brought the plight of children to international attention. Eglantyne Jebb, a British social reformer, was central to this effort. She and her sister Dorothy Buxton founded the Save the Children Fund in 1919 to aid children in former enemy countries, a stance that was controversial at the time. In 1920 Jebb helped establish the Save the Children International Union in Geneva, which brought together national organizations.
Jebb believed that charity alone was not enough and that children needed a set of principles recognized by governments. She drafted a brief charter of rights, which the International Union endorsed in 1923. The following year, on 26 September 1924, the Assembly of the League of Nations adopted it, and it became known as the Geneva Declaration.
The text was brief, consisting of five principles. It stated that children must be given the means needed for normal development, both materially and spiritually. It said that a hungry child must be fed, a sick child nursed, a backward child helped, and a delinquent child reclaimed, and that orphans and waifs must be sheltered and supported. It also held that children must be first to receive relief in times of distress, be put in a position to earn a livelihood while being protected from exploitation, and be raised with the awareness that their talents should serve others.
The declaration had no enforcement mechanism, and the League could not compel member states to follow it. Its language also treated children mainly as people to be protected rather than as individuals with their own voices, a view that later thinking would broaden. Even so, it established the idea that the international community had a stake in how children were treated. The United Nations General Assembly adopted an expanded Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959, and the 1989 Convention eventually turned these ideas into binding treaty obligations. The Geneva Declaration is therefore often seen as the starting point of modern child rights law.