Corporate partners help UNICEF fund our programmes for children, advocate with us on their behalf, or facilitate our work through logistical, technical, research or supply support.

We must ensure that while eliminating child labor in the export industry, we are also eliminating their labour from the informal sector, which is more invisible to public scrutiny - and thus leaves the children more open to abuse and exploitation.

It's estimated that there may be two hundred and fifty million children in the world engaged in some form of exploitative child labour.

When the lives and the rights of children are at stake, there must be no silent witnesses.

And each of us can practice rights ourselves, treating each other without discrimination, respecting each other's dignity and rights.

The Convention is not only a visionary document. We are reminded daily that it is an agreement that works - and its utility can be seen in the everyday use to which I have seen it increasingly being put by country after country, in policy, in practice and in law.

Northern Uganda presents a situation of extraordinary violation of the rights of children.