Children's participation's basis in human rights

The United Nations is the source of the international human rights laws currently in use globally, dating from shortly after the Second World War (1939-45). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) makes it clear that freedom to take part in democratic society is a right for all human beings, an idea that is spelt out in more detail in the 1966 United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights . As human beings, children should not be excluded from these rights, but this was not made explicit until the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.