ABSTRACT
The Bellagio roundtable was described as the most important meeting in UNICEF's first 17 years and marked the change of UNICEF from a humanitarian welfare agency for children to a fully fledged development agency, concerned for children in all aspects of life. UNICEF's programme approach recognized that the main actions for children needed to be part and parcel of each country’s whole effort for development, to which UNICEF's own contributions in resources or expertise would be relatively small. Orthodox economics has two approaches to human rights: either they are treated as one of the background elements of national institutions needed for a fully functioning free-market system, or they are ignored, more commonly the latter. UNICEF and the UN sees them as a necessary part of a humane society and in 1959 UNICEF passed the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, elaborating and reinforcing elements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
