FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM 27 relative and secondly to local, customary or traditional standards. This challenge seeks to decrease the scope of normative standards generally, and is particularly undermining women’s rights which so often conflict with patriarchal religious structures as is reflected in many reservations to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 1979. Therefore, to ensure women enjoy all rights, these above-mentioned obstacles need to be overcome. Trafficking of women and girls is directly linked to the failure of governments to accord women the same basic rights as men. Women who have been denied the right to education and legal rights are consequently denied the right to education and legal rights are consequently also denied the right to control their lives. Unskilled are unable to be economically independent, such women are especially vulnerable to trafficking63. 2. Children and Human Rights Since human rights are inalienable rights, which start at the time of birth, children are equally entitled to human rights in the same way as adults do. Children are the future; therefore, their special needs must be accommodated within the human rights discourse. Keeping this in view, on 20 November 1989, the international community extended the mantle of human rights protection to children when it adopted the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This is the first international legal instrument, which guarantees human rights for children. The Convention makes States, which accept the Convention, legally accountable for their actions towards children. The guiding spirit of the Convention is the ‘best interest of the child’. Positive and forward-looking in its approach, the Convention calls on States, which ratify it to create the conditions in which children may take an active and creative part in the social and political life of their countries. A child is defined in the Convention as a person under the age of eighteen, unless the national laws fix an earlier age of majority. Encompassing the whole range of human rights - civil, political, economic, social and cultural - the Convention recognizes that the enjoyment of one right cannot be separated from the enjoyment of others. 63 Supra note 26, p. 12.