1978　Draft of the Convention on the Rights of the Child submitted by the Polish government

In 1978, 19 years after the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, the Polish government submitted a draft of the Convention on the Rights of the Child to the UN Human Rights Committee. In addition to losing many children in World War II, Poland had inherited the spirit of Janusz Kolczak, a Polish Jew who was a pediatrician and ran an orphanage.

Poland was invaded by Germany in 1939, and the Soviet Union invaded Poland the same year. Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union and became the battleground of World War II. Poland lost approximately 6 million lives (about 20% of its population), including 2 million children, in World War II, and the capital city of Warsaw, which was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945, was destroyed at a rate of about 80%. Having experienced such great damage and misfortune, Poland sought to avoid a repetition of this tragedy and submitted a draft of the “Convention on the Rights of the Child”, calling for the Declaration of the Rights of the Child to be made into a treaty. After the war, Poland became a socialist country and belonged to the Eastern camp during the Cold War. The Western countries insisted that they were the only ones advocating human rights and fundamental freedoms, but Poland took a leading role in the field of human rights, which was supported by the Eastern countries and agreed to by the rest of the world.

Poland's submission of the draft Convention on the Rights of the Child was also influenced by the spirit of Janusz Kolczak, a Polish Jewish pediatrician and director of an orphanage. Kolchak is also known as the “father of the Convention on the Rights of the Child” and as “Dr. Kolchak.” Beginning in 1911, Kolchak built an orphanage in Warsaw to provide education that emphasized the independence of children. The orphanage was self-governed by the children, and Kolchak nurtured them to respect their personalities and develop their individuality. Kolchak saw the relationship between teacher and child, and between parent and child, as one of mutual influence and sometimes mutual growth, and he left the phrase “Not to the child but with the child.” Kolchak advocated “children's rights” in the context of children, including babies, as subjects of rights, a novel and progressive idea at the time. In “How to Love a Child” (1918), he taught that even babies are not their parents' but separate, individual human beings, because children have different personalities from their parents from birth and are subjects of rights.

Kolchak died in a gas chamber along with 200 orphanage children in 1942 during World War II in German-occupied Poland under the policy of extermination of Jews. At this time, Kolchak was granted a special pardon for his work as an educator. Kolchak first asked the soldiers to take the children off the transport vehicles to the camps, but the soldiers said, “No children. Only teachers.” Kolchak never got off the vehicle.

However, the spirit of Kolchak's conception of the child as a “subject of rights” was carried over to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was drafted by Poland, and has become the ideological basis of the Convention.