Thai child's painting.

ara Amin opened the Forum by noting that miracles can happen. We all hope for miracles, and one of the biggest in my memory has happened over the past year. That is the acceptance and ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 

The CRC is one of the most radical human rights conventions ever, and it has been ratified by virtually every country and has moved the opportunities for children forward immensely. It includes both civil and political rights as well as economic and social rights. 

The CRC establishes children's rights to sur-vival, protection, development and participa-tion and this includes optimum health. Like the Code, it provides us with a new framework for action on behalf of children. And interes-tingly, most of the basic principles required for moving ahead with the CRC in terms of child feeding are already there with the Code. We now need to sit down and work on the details. 

The basic principles behind the Code in-volve a child's right to health. The internal standard of the CRC can be translated in the same way as we interpret the child's basic right to breastfeed because it is a well established fact that breastfeeding is best for the child. Therefore, it is the child's right to be breastfed. So it is the country's responsibility to ensure that breastfeeding is promoted, protected and supported in every way needed. 

Breastfeeding is the best example we have when it comes to legalizing the rights of the child, and all of the work our partners and we have done on the Code should serve as an important experience for implementing the CRC in terms of the legal process, the implementation process and the monitoring systems.