Mr Morgan was giving a lecture to the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston.  He was on a visit to Texas with Swansea University Vice Chancellor Professor Richard B. Davies, to strengthen and develop partnership agreements with top universities in the Lone Star State.

Swansea University is already working with Rice and A&M universities and the Houston Methodist Hospital Research Institute in Texas, and is developing new agreements with the University of Houston and the University of Texas in Austin.

‌Mr Morgan told his audience that the Welsh Assembly, as a newly-established democratic institution, needed to show that it was a ‘real’ legislature, not a talking shop.

It was a boost to the prestige of Wales and the Welsh Assembly to be linked directly to the United Nations via the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

Mr Morgan said:

“It is hard to draft a law of this path-breaking kind when no one else has done it before. The bureaucracy in Wales was very wary.

What is the key to the UNCRC law is that it takes child protection and welfare one step further.  Traditionally, children are seen in law as having interests but not rights. They were objects of protection not holders of rights.

The key difference is to treat children as ‘citizens’, even though they don’t have the right to vote.  

Traditional children’s social work has treated them as clients, persons the state should protect because they are too young to protect themselves. That’s been the basis of child welfare since it kicked off in the mid-nineteenth century.

Now Wales has pioneered the move to a rights-based approach – fit for the twenty-first century.”

Wales Observatory on Human Rights of Children and Young People, based at Swansea University