Plan Ireland urges the International Community to keep the rights of the child a priority as Plan’s report on Universal Birth Registration launches

Friday the 20th November 2009 marks the twentieth year since the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Plan International: the Children’s Development Agency has launched an interim report called “Count Every Child” the result of a five year Universal Birth Registration (UBR) campaign.  Plan Ireland, a member of Plan International, supports this campaign which means that more than 40 million people across 32 countries, most of them children, have been ‘found’ and registered during the campaign. Millions more children today and in the future can:   

_Get access to life-saving medicine and health care, schooling, finance, voting and legal aid. _ Be protected from becoming victims of various forms of sexual exploitation and abuse from human trafficking and the sex industry.  _ Be guarded from illegal and extremely dangerous child labour and coerced lives as child brides and press-ganged child soldiers.

David Dalton, CEO of Plan Ireland says “Despite recent setbacks, Ireland has an excellent reputation among the international community for its generosity to the less well off countries. I urge the Taoiseach, his Ministers for Foreign Affairs, Finance and Overseas Development and our representatives in the UN to employ whatever means they can to generate enthusiasm among the international community for a new deal for the world’s children. It would be a great feather in this nation’s cap if they could get the solemn promises that have been made to the world’s children back to the top of the international agenda”Speaking recently about Plan’s UBR campaign Archbishop Desmond Tutu said:”There are so many cases around the world where children have been exploited and abused. It is possible in some cases that a birth certificate, the proof of their identity and existence as future citizens of the world, would have helped to prevent some of this exploitation and abuse.”Since helping Plan to launch the campaign almost 5 years ago, I can see the achievements have been remarkable: from small-scale projects in remote parts of the world to changes in legislation… literally millions of children have been registered thanks to the efforts of Plan and all its partners”.

A copy of the Count Every Child report is available to download on www.plan.ie