(1949).

The articles in this volume shed light on some of the major tensions in the field of children‘s rights (such as the ways in which children‘s best interests and respect for their autonomy can be reconciled), challenges (such as how the CRC can be made a reality in the lives of children in the face of ignorance, apathy or outright opposition) and critiques (whether children‘s rights are a Western imposition or a successful global consensus). Along the way, the writing covers a myriad of issues, encompassing the opposition to the CRC in the US; gay parenting: Dr Seuss‘s take on children‘s autonomy; the voice of neonates on their health care; the role of NGO in supporting child labourers in India, and young people in detention and more.

The phenomenon of child trafficking holds a unique position as an issue of significant contemporary relevance, occupying a principal place in debates about human rights today. The interchangeable terms trafficking and modern slavery evoke emotive responses and proclamations about abolition of contemporary ills, viewed as the ultimate aberration when a child is involved. The classification of children under legal frameworks marks them as different, as ‘other’, and in the context of laws implemented to address trafficking, slavery, and children on the move more generally, this distinction is complicated. This book charts the emergence, decline and re-emergence of child trafficking law and policy during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It provides a systematic and comprehensive overview of the historical origins of child trafficking by utilising the wealth of information located within the non-digitised archives of the League of Nations. It focusses upon the Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children to engage with League of Nations policy to provide an insightful and original contribution to the current body of literature. This is a book that seeks to critique the entanglements of children’s rights and colonialism in relation to the mobility and exploitation of children. It centralises the legacy of colonialism, the undercurrents of race, white supremacy, patriarchy, and their ongoing influence upon contemporary anti-trafficking legal and policy responses. Through utilizing what the author identifies as the ‘anti-trafficking machine’ as a theoretical framework, the book challenges contemporary law and policy responses to child trafficking. This theoretical framework has been adopted to illustrate a central hypothesis of the book – that the contemporary anti-trafficking agenda is both imperialist and a continuity of colonial attitudes.

How well have children fared in the UK in the thirty years since the National Children's Bureau was established in 1963. How has family life changed? What have been the main social and demographic changes? Has the welfare state continued to provide education, health care and social welfare for all children? These and other questions are considered as the authors reflect on the main changes in legislation, on key messages from research and on whether developments in practice have reflected these research findings.

This book examines Ghana's implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Ghana's commitment to the Convention which she was the first country to ratify is explored in a series of studies and analyses on child rights promulgations and programs. The book further discusses the challenges the country faces in her efforts of protecting children's rights while providing an insight into future directions for continued support of children's rights.

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.

At a time of escalating global conflict and instability, this book examines international efforts to protect children from the effects of war and armed conflict through the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), especially article 38, and the Convention’s Optional Protocol on the involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (OPAC). The principal focus of the book is on the existing UN established machinery for implementing the CRC and OPAC – the Committee on the Rights of the Child and its processes for monitoring states’ compliance with the CRC and OPAC. The book exposes major shortcoming in the monitoring process and concludes by examining possible ways in which compliance with the CRC and OPAC, and with human rights conventions in general, might be secured more effectively. The work has significance not just for scholars working on human rights and the UN, but also for international organisations dealing with human rights in general and with children’s rights and armed conflict in particular. It is also significant for UN and EU policy-makers and for grass roots NGOs.