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Juan Miguel Petit has been the UN's Special Rapporteur on the sale of children child prostitution and child pornography since 2001. Mr Petit, a graduate in law and social sciences, has worked for many years as a journalist and social scientist. He was a member of the Board of the National Child Institute of Uruguay (1985-1990) and has been involved in a variety of NGO programmes for children, including assistance to street children. During the military dictatorship in Uruguay (1973-1985), he worked as a journalist and editor of opposition publications. More recently he edited a monthly news magazine. Mr. Petit currently works as technical coordinator of the National Rehabilitation Centre, a recent initiative aimed at the education and social reintegration of young detainees, which gives them access to study or work opportunities outside of prison while they are serving their sentences. He also writes about social issues for the Uruguayan newspaper El País. How do you feel about the upcoming renewal of your mandate? I feel we did a lot of things but I would have liked to have done more. I would have liked to have visited more countries, but this was not always made possible. I have learned a lot. I hope to have given a good service to people working in the field and I intend to continue working in human rights and on trafficking with the UN. I think that renewal is always necessary. It is important that new visions are introduced, and there is a need for perspectives from different cultures and countries. We carried out nine country visits, and composed six thematic reports which we thought could be important for people working in the field, such as on missing children and preventative programmes. We also tried to highlight good practices. We are still lacking interchange in the field. It is important that experiences are shared. We have been very active in asking questions of governments that we feel are important. It is difficult getting governments, for example, to sign the Optional Protocol (what is this?) when talking of abstract contexts, but when we speak of specific stories it adds life to the issue. Is there a particular issue or experience that you were most affected by? I am basically a trained journalist so individual cases focus reality much better. There have been lots of personal experiences, particularly in local programmes and shelters. For example, we were taken by an investigative journalist to meet children in Romania, who we spent a couple of hours with. We went to eat in a well-known hamburger restaurant, and there was another child their surrounded by friends and family. You could see in big cities how there can be an enormous gap – the faces of the children we were with showed they were fascinated. There was a huge divide in where they had come from, and also where they were going. When we see things like that, there is an urgent need that pushes us to build bridges for all the children, and the families too. What has been the best thing about your job? And the worst? The best thing about my job has been that when we visit programmes we can see how they work with children, assisting victims, and we can try to offer them alternatives. The worst is when we see situations which we think may well not change. But at least we have had the opportunity to see these situations, as many people don't. We have the chance to fight. How do you think the role will complement that of the Special Representative to the Secretary-General on Violence Against Children? They have to coordinate. I would suggest that they focus on the same thematic issues and countries so that they can complement each other's work. If you could give one piece of advice to child rights activist, what would it be? I would say that people must bear in mind no one is the owner of child rights, or can offer the best solutions. We must all work together according to a democratic mentality. How would you sum up child rights? The right to be what you are, and to develop according to what nature has handed out, and not be preventing from developing because of the the obstacles created by other people. CRIN is running a series of interviews with leading global child rights activists in fortnightly editions of our Tuesday CRINMAIL. Get inspired by the words of: