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OSLO, Norway - As a recent international conference got down to forging a new global plan against child labour, ILO Director-General Michel Hansenne sought to clarify matters: "Allow me to start with one bold statement," the Director General said in his keynote address to the International Conference on Child Labour. "The war against child labour is being won, and it can be won in all countries in the coming 15 years." With that, the Conference, organized by the Government of Norway in collaboration with the ILO and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), embarked on a debate that produced a wide-ranging agreement on international action against child labour: a new "Agenda for Action" endorsed by 40 countries, and based on what the Conference chair, Norwegian Minister of Development and Human Rights Hilde F. Johnson, called simply, "reality".
The Conference was the latest in a series of international meetings on child labour which have included the World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, held in Stockholm in 1996, and a Child Labour Conference held in Amsterdam in February 1997. The meeting gathered some 350 high-level representatives from governments, workers' and employers' organizations, non-governmental organizations and a number of international organizations and independent experts.
The meetings have been held amid mounting concern for some 250 million children who often work in exploitative and hazardous conditions and face injury, illness and even death. Globally, child labour is most prevalent in the less-developed regions. In absolute terms, Asia has the largest number of child workers (approximately 61 percent of the world total) as compared with Africa (32 per cent) and Latin America (7 per cent).
Noting that millions of child labourers were "defenceless" and often had neither the time nor the opportunity for proper schooling, Mr. Hansenne stated "child labour is simply the single most important cause of child exploitation and child abuse in the world today. This must stop."
Hansenne proposed a four-point strategy involving a political commitment to the effective and total abolition of child labour; backing this political commitment with a time-bound programme of action against child labour, encompassing prevention, removal andrehabilitation; the adoption of a new international Convention to suppress all extreme forms of child labour; and, a global compact of international cooperation and mutual assistance to allocate more resources to fight world poverty and child labour and to combat the international aspects of the problem, such as the sale and trafficking of children and child sex tourism.
In adopting an "Agenda for Action," the Conference urged a time-bound programme to eliminate child labour and called on nations to give urgent, immediate priority to ending the most intolerable or extreme forms of child labour. Highlighting preventive measures, especially education, as the most cost effective way to combat child labour, the Agenda urges nations to work "progressively" to eliminate child labour among children of school age, especially those activities which interfere with children's development and education. Global "investment in the human capital from early childhood, e.g., education and health" should be stepped up, the Agenda says, as a tool for economic and social development which can help reduce the number of working children.
Noting that one of the goals of the Conference was to identify national and international strategies for eliminating child labour generally, with a special emphasis on the role of development cooperation, the Agenda also urges that existing bilateral and multilateral development cooperation programmes be examined to assess their effects on child labour, and "where appropriate, in cooperation with the developing countries concerned, adjusting the programmes to ensure better use of resources and a greater impact".
Dutch Minister of Labour Ad Melkert, who chaired the International Conference on Child Labour in Amsterdam, said, "The Amsterdam Conference was a leap forward to commitment and action. We are here again because we all have been seized by a sense of urgency with regard to the abolishment of child labour."
In formally opening the Oslo meeting, Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik said: "What we are discussing (here) is the labour that turns children into instruments and robots, the degrading toil which steals from the children their very childhood, which deprives them of the most important tool to break the poverty cycle - education. It must be brought to an end."
Among the issues discussed in Oslo was the impact of child labour on educational achievement. In urging governments to adopt a time-bound programme of action to eliminate all extreme forms of child labour, UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said: "Child labourers around the world, most of whom are engaged in extreme and hazardous forms of work, are being robbed of their fundamental rights, not only including the right to develop to the fullest through education, but the right to a childhood."
In his address, Hansenne noted that the ILO was preparing a draft convention on the most intolerable forms of child labour, which would be examined at the International Labour Conference in 1998 and could result in the adoption of a Convention and a Recommendation at the Conference in 1999.
Offering her support, Bellamy said "UNICEF wholeheartedly endorses the idea of a new and more focused ILO Convention".
But Hansenne also brought in the question of globalization, and its impact on child labour. Noting that the question of child labour had become central in the context of the liberalization of world trade, he said: "Ours should be a principled position that mankind owes to the child the best it has to give, that global action against child labour is based not on unilateral action and trade sanctions, but on multilateral voluntary action and moral pressure. The globalization and liberalization of world trade must be accompanied by observance of fundamental rights of workers, including the prohibition of child labour."
Delegates and speakers agreed that a key element in the struggle against child labour will be the parallel struggle against poverty. The action plan calls for ensuring that social and economic policies to combat poverty focus on the needs of families and communities, with special emphasis on providing families of child workers with sustainable employment and income opportunities.
In her closing statement, Norwegian Minister Johnson stated that the new Agenda for Action was not just words, but "firmly anchored in reality".
"Investment in the physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development of children is an ethical, social and economic imperative for all societies," she said. "Child labour is both a consequence and a cause of poverty, and strategies for poverty reduction are needed to address the root cause of child labour."
That call to fight poverty as a means to fight child labour was endorsed by Assefa Bequele of the ILO, who said that "the problem is primarily a national responsibility, and national governments must design policies and programmes aimed at providing productive employment attacking poverty".
"But it is also a world responsibility," Bequele added. "Efforts must be made at the international level to see in what way the world community could be mobilized in a sustained attack on world poverty. From here in Oslo, let the word go out that child labour is a one-world problem, and that we are united in words and deeds in saying 'no' to child labour and 'no' to the causes of child labour."