Justice & Law Quote by Carol Bellamy

There is a quiet provocation tucked into Bellamy's bureaucratically calm sentence: it reframes children from policy objects into political subjects. The word "unequivocal" does heavy lifting, signaling impatience with half-measures and symbolic "youth voice" campaigns that are easy to photograph and easier to ignore. She’s not merely advocating kindness; she’s staking out a governance principle that treats consultation as a right, not a favor.

The phrasing also reveals the institutional context it’s meant to police. "The Convention" points to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Bellamy (a longtime UNICEF leader as well as an educator) is speaking in the language of compliance: "call", "consulted", "heard", "considered", "drafted". This is procedural vocabulary because procedure is where power hides. If you can embed participation at the drafting stage, you’re not just reacting to harm after it happens; you’re shaping what counts as harm in the first place.

Subtext: the adults in charge routinely invoke "best interests" as a trump card to override children, particularly when their views are inconvenient, politically risky, or messy. Bellamy pairs "opinions heard" with "best interests considered" to close that loophole. She’s arguing that welfare without voice is paternalism, and voice without consequence is theater.

The intent is less sentimental than structural: to make policy-making answerable to those who live with its consequences, even when those people can’t vote. In an era when education, online safety, and juvenile justice are fought over in adult moral panics, the line reads like a demand for due process for childhood itself.