Provides insights into a lively field of international human rights politics – the protection of children and their rights – by looking at the negotiations leading to the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Children’s rights law is often studied and perceived in isolation from the broader field of human rights law. This volume explores the inter-relationship between children’s rights law and more general human rights law in order to see whether elements from each could successfully inform the other. Children’s rights law has a number of distinctive characteristics, such as the emphasis on the ‘best interests of the child’, the use of general principles, and the inclusion of ‘third parties’ (e.g. parents and other care-takers) in treaty provisions. The first part of this book questions whether these features could be a source of inspiration for general human rights law. In part two, the reverse question is asked: could children’s rights law draw inspiration from developments in other branches of human rights law that focus on other specific categories of rights holders, such as women, persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples, or older persons? Finally, the interaction between children’s rights law and human rights law – and the potential for their isolation, inspiration or integration – may be coloured or determined by the thematic issue under consideration. Therefore the third part of the book studies the interplay between children’s rights law and human rights law in the context of specific topics: intra-family relations, LGBTQI marginalization, migration, media, the environment and transnational human rights obligations.

This book examines how and why, in the context of International Relations, children’s subjecthood has all too often been relegated to marginal terrains and children themselves automatically associated with the need for protection in vulnerable situations: as child soldiers, refugees, and conflated with women, all typically with the accent on the Global South. Challenging us to think critically about childhood as a technology of global governance, the authors explore alternative ways of finding children and their agency in a more central position in IR, in terms of various forms of children’s activism, children and climate change, children and security, children and resilience, and in their inevitable role in governing the future. Focusing on the problems, pitfalls, promises, and prospects of addressing children and childhoods in International Relations, this book places children more squarely in the purview of political subjecthood and hence more centrally in IR.

Thirty years after the adoption of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, this book provides diverse perspectives from countries and regions across the globe on its implementation, critique and potential for reform. The book revolves around key issues including progress in implementing the CRC worldwide; how to include children in legal proceedings; how to uphold children’s various civil rights; how to best assist children at risk; and discussions surrounding children’s identity rights in a changing familial order. Discussion of the CRC is both compelling and polarizing and the book portrays the enthusiasm around these topics through contrasting and comparative opinions on a range of topics. The work provides varying perspectives from many different countries and regions, offering a wealth of insight on topics that will be of significant interest to scholars and practitioners working in the areas of children’s rights and justice.

Children's rights law is a relatively young but rapidly developing discipline. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, the field's core legal instrument, is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. Yet, like children themselves, children's rights are often relegated to the margins in mainstream legal, political, and other discourses, despite their application to approximately one-third of the world's population and every human being's first stages of life. Now thirty years old, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) signalled a definitive shift in the way that children are viewed and understood--from passive objects subsumed within the family to full human beings with a distinct set of rights. Although the CRC and other children's rights law have spurred positive changes in law, policies, and attitudes toward children in numerous countries, implementation remains a work in progress. We have reached a state in the evolution of children's rights in which we need more critical evaluation and assessment of the CRC and the large body of children's rights law and policy that this treaty has inspired. We have moved from conceptualizing and adopting legislation to focusing on implementation and making the content of children's rights meaningful in the lives of all children. This book provides a critical evaluation and assessment of children's rights law, including the CRC. With contributions from leading scholars and practitioners from around the world, it aims to elucidate the content of children's rights law, explore the complexities of implementation, and identify critical challenges and opportunities for children's rights law.

The bodies and minds of children--and the very space of children--are under assault. This is the message we receive from daily news headlines about violence, sexual abuse, exploitation, and neglect of children, and from a proliferation of books in recent years representing the domain of contemporary childhood as threatened, invaded, polluted, and "stolen" by adults. Through a series of essays that explore the global dimensions of children at risk, an international group of researchers and policymakers discuss the notion of children's rights, and in particular the claim that every child has a right to a cultural identity. Explorations of children's situations in Japan, Korea, Singapore, South Africa, England, Norway, the United States, Brazil, and Germany reveal how children's everyday lives and futures are often the stakes in contemporary battles that adults wage over definitions of cultural identity and state cultural policies. Throughout this volume, the authors address the complex and often ambiguous implications of the concept of rights. For example, it may be used to defend indigenous children from radically assimilationist or even genocidal state policies; but it may also be used to legitimate racist institutions. A substantive introduction by the editor examines global political economic frameworks for the cultural debates affecting children and traces intriguing, sometimes surprising, threads throughout the papers. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Norma Field, Marilyn Ivy, Mary John, Hae-joang Cho, Saya Shiraishi, Vivienne Wee, Pamela Reynolds, Kathleen Hall, Ruth Mandel, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, and Njabulo Ndebele.

Scholars from a range of different disciplines explore how best to implement children's rights.