SOCHUM: ADDRESSING CHILD LABOR AND THE DENIAL OF CHILDREN’S RIGHTS TO EDUCATION AND PROTECTION

The Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee — the Third Committee of the General Assembly — addresses the questions of human dignity that sit at the intersection of social policy, cultural identity, and individual rights. At BILSEM-MUN 2026, SOCHUM convenes to confront one of the most persistent failures of the modern international order: the continued exploitation of children through labor, and the systemic denial of their rights to education and protection. The International Labour Organization estimates that some 160 million children remain in child labor today, nearly half of them in its worst forms.

Delegates will engage with ILO Convention 138 on the minimum age for admission to employment and Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labor, with Article 32 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, with the implementation gaps in SDG target 8.7, and with the link between child labor and the denial of the Article 28 right to education. The committee will examine the role of supply-chain due diligence, the conditions that produce hazardous work in agriculture and informal economies, the legal versus illegal forms of child work, and the institutional responsibility of states whose enforcement capacity is structurally limited.

This is a committee for delegates who can hold principle and pragmatism together — who recognise that a binding norm without implementation is rhetoric, and that an implementation strategy without rights at its centre will eventually betray the children it claims to protect.