To browse Academia. Since it establishes a public responsibility for all people and an ethical duty that cannot be abdicated, it commits both the State and the Society to guarantee the satisfaction of social needs, essential for the material and subjective life of every human being.
Thus, the struggle to affirm the protection of childhood as a right, as well as the recognition that they are "subjects of rights" and "people in a peculiar condition of development" requires the establishment of parameters for their regulation and assurance, through normative instruments, public bodies, promotion mechanisms, aiming at its implementation. In that respect, the importance of the international treaties adopted and ratified, throughout the 20th century, by different countries in the world, in which the Participating States assumed a set of political commitments, which should guide the formulation and execution of public policies aimed at childhood protection.
Over the course of the 20 th century, the social and legal status of the child evolved considerably. One remarkable illustration of this process can be seen by tracing the evolution of specific international treaties on the rights of the child. Although developments in national legislation inspired the authors of these treaties, it was through inter-and non-governmental organizations that the rights of the child developed a new dimension.
Using archival data from several such organizations, this article adopts a transnational perspective to analyze how the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child was drafted, institutionalized, and disseminated. The declaration joined together two causes: the defence of children and the promotion of the child's universal human rights. Thus the adoption of this declaration was an essential stage in reformulating transnational norms on the rights of the child.
Their history is sometimes read as a linear, uni-directional and progressive process. However, a socio-historical perspective illustrates the dynamic and iterative nature of this social and legal evolution.
