Each year, Human Rights Watch reflects on progress in children’s rights worldwide. From better access to education to stronger protections in wartime, these are some highlights from 2025.
- New data from the International Labour Organization and UNICEF found 20 million fewer children involved in child labor than in 2020.
- Malawi and Japan both abolished school fees in public secondary schools. Vietnam enacted free tuition for all public school students from preschool through secondary school.
- Brazil passed a landmark law to protect children’s rights online, the first Latin American country to pass a such a dedicated law for children.
- Bolivia, Grenada, Burkina Faso, Portugal, and Kuwait each raised the legal minimum age for marriage to 18. In the United States, the states of Maine, Oregon, and Missouri banned child marriage.
- In September, 92 countries met for the first time to formally consider a possible new international treaty to guarantee free education for all children from pre-primary through secondary school. To date, 60 countries have pledged their support for a treaty.
- Thailand, Czechia, and Switzerland banned all corporal punishment of children, bringing the total number of countries with such bans to 70.
- The United States and Kosovo endorsed the Safe Schools Declaration, a political commitment to protect education during war, bringing the number of countries endorsing the declaration to 122.
- China initiated a subsidy program for families with children under age 3, while Fiji, Japan, Morocco, Türkiye, and Tunisia increased benefits for children, and the United Kingdom announced it will remove the “two-child limit” for families receiving child-related social security support. Such measures can play a powerful role in reducing child poverty: in the UK alone, ending the two-child limit is projected to lift about 450,000 children out of relative low income by 2030.
- The International Criminal Court prosecutor requested arrest warrants against two senior Taliban leaders for serious abuses against women and girls in Afghanistan, citing gender persecution, a crime against humanity.
- The Western Australia state government announced a new reparations program for the “Stolen Generations,” Indigenous children who were forcibly removed from their families under racist policies that began in the early 1900s and lasted into the 1970s.
Children around the world continue to face serious threats to their rights, but these examples demonstrate that real improvements are achievable.
