I am not too deep into following the international affairs of the UN and UNICEF but it is very naive to think that such bodies genuinely actually care, for their own sake, about dubious depictions of drawn children. These are political bodies that work for political goals. The truth is almost certainly much closer to being tied with things like soft power - Japanese media means a lot of soft power overseas, the so called "Cool Japan" phenomenon. This soft power struggle has been going on in Yankeeland in the 90s since the rise of Pokemon and has been intermittently taken up multiple times lol - a good historical example is the strange hostility that JRPGs got from a lot of game reviewers in the 2000s, specifically for being Japanese, a reflection of the fear that Japanese entertainment would prevail and thus America would lose a slice of its global cultural influence pie. It is frankly better to not credit such institutions when they speak of their ostensibly non-political goals.