Subsequently, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 proclaimed a basic catalog of internationally recognized human rights, most of which were equally applicable to children and adults. The first efforts at the international level were undertaken by the League of Nations, which established a special committee to deal with questions relating to the protection of children and adopted conventions prohibiting the traffic in women and children (1921) and slavery (1926)., The Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1924 by the Assembly of the League, was not cast in terms of state obligation but of duties declared and accepted by "men and women of all nations" and according to which "the child must be given the means requisite for its normal development, both materially and spiritually." In general those rights overlap significantly with all human rights, but they also extend to a variety of special measures to which children are entitled by virtue of their special vulnerability. In recent years the children's rights movement has gathered considerable strength and the adoption of international legal standards has been viewed by many as a particularly useful means to entrench in national law the notion that children have rights. Since the early 10th century such assumptions have gradually been abandoned and childhood has come to be recognized as a special status warranting the adoption of special measures of protection. Instead, the earliest legislation such as the Roman patria potestas doctrine treated the child as parental, and usually paternal, property.
Worse still was the fact that, whereas married women and lunatics were considered to be entitled to special measures of protection, children were not. In not so distant times many national legal systems classified children along with married women and lunatics as being legally incompetent and thus not entitled to exercise a wide range of rights on their own behalf.
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