February 2008

This year’s Civic Values issue is devoted to the Fight Against Child Exploitation, Intergenerational Solidarity and Cultural Diversity.

Fight Against Child Exploitation

Official reports from the International Labour Organization (ILO) state that more than 218 million children are forced to work due to poverty and child exploitation; information which evidences the lack of protection of children in large parts of the world. Most of these children work in agriculture and a large number is exploited by multinationals, thus the interest of industrialized countries to compromise in the penalization of companies using child labour to obtain low production costs. Another form of child exploitation is prostitution encouraged by the child’s own families. The regions with a higher index of child exploitation are in Asia and the Pacific followed by subsharian Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Intergenerational Solidarity

Intergenerational Solidarity supports the protection of the weakest members of society such as children and old people securing conciliation between family and work. If traditionally it has been mainly women looking after children and elderly people, the incorporation of women into the workplace has made this more difficult and brought about the need to implement government policies to cover these needs. The support and care of the elderly through programs of active ageing, the provision of social services and special wards run by trained staff are some of the citizen’s rights that governments must see to.

Cultural Diversity

The arts, lifestyle, traditions, values and believes of every society are some of the features that result in the Cultural Diversity. In 2001, UNESCO adopted the “Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity” with the commitment to preserve cultural diversity as an adaptive process in which each individual must acknowledge otherness in all its forms but also the plurality of his or her own identity within societies that are themselves plural.

The stamp, dedicated to cultural diversity and designed by the design studio, Estudio Jesús Sánchez, was awarded the Asiago International Award for Philatelic Art 2008.

The stamp depicts designs referred to these three topics.