Rights for the World’s Children: Rädda Barnen and the Making of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) from 1989 remains the most widely ratified treaty on human rights and functions as a normative frame for myriads of actors working to promote the rights of children. The scholarship on the convention recognises that non-governmental organisations were crucial to the drafting of the treaty. Some of these accounts also single out the Swedish Save the Children Federation (Rädda Barnen) as significant for facilitating non-governmental cooperation and shaping the drafting group discussions. Drawing on archival and published first-hand sources, the paper adds to the available accounts, first by outlining some of the developments that led Rädda Barnen to embrace the concept of children’s rights in the 1970s and become involved in drafting of UNCRC in the 1980s. The paper then reveals how the organisation engaged creatively with the concept of children’s rights in the drafting process and succeeded in framing children in armed conflict and female genital mutilation as rights issues, effectively challenging some of the conventional boundaries of international human rights law. But the paper also points to the limits of Rädda Barnen’s influence and suggests that its creative engagement took place within a relatively conventional framework of child protection.