International Handbook of Children’s Rights Studies

Since the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) children’s rights have assumed a central position in a wide variety of disciplines and policies.

This handbook offers an engaging overview of the contemporary research landscape for those people in the theory and practice of children’s rights. The volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to children’s rights, as well as key thematic issues in children’s rights at the intersection of global and local concerns. The main approaches and topics within the volume are:

• Law, social work, and the sociology of childhood and anthropology

• Geography, childhood studies, gender studies and citizenship studies

• Participation, education and health

• Juvenile justice and alternative care

• Violence against children and female genital mutilation

• Child labour, working children and child poverty

• Migration, indigenous children and resource exploitation

The specially commissioned chapters have been written by renowned scholars and researchers and come together to provide a critical and invaluable guide to the challenges and dilemmas currently facing children’s rights.

© Routledge

Children’s Rights in Africa

A Legal Perspective

This collection is anchored in an African conception of children’s rights and the law, and reflects contemporary discourses taking place in the region of the children’s rights sphere. The majority of contributors are African and adopt an individual approach to their topic which reflects their first-hand experience. The book focuses on child rights issues which have particular resonance on the continent and the chapters span themes which are both broad and narrow, containing subject matter which is both theoretical and illuminated by practice. The book profiles recent developments and experiences in furthering children’s legal rights in the African context, and distils from these future trends the specific role that the law can play in the African children’s rights environment.

© Routledge

The Rights of the Child in a Changing World

25 Years After The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

This book deals with the implementation of the rights of the child as enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 21 countries from Europe, Asia, Australia, and the USA. It gives an overview of the legal status of children regarding their most salient rights, such as the implementation of the best interest principle, the right of the child to know about of his/her origin, the right to be heard, to give medical consent, the right of the child in the field of employment, religious education of children, prohibition of physical punishment, protection of the child through deprivation of parental rights and in the case of inter-country adoption.

In the last 25 years since the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted, many States Parties to the Convention have made great efforts to pass legislation regulating the rights of the child, in their commitment to the improvement of the legal status of the child. However, is that enough for any child to live better, safer, and healthier? What are the practical effects of this international as well as many national instruments in the everyday life of children? Have there been any outcomes in terms of improvement of their status around the world, and improvement of the conditions under which they live, since the Convention entered into force? In tackling these questions, this work presents a comparative overview of the implementation of the Convention, and evaluates the results achieved.

© Springer

 

International Human Rights of Children

This book explores the meaning and implementation of international children’s rights law, as laid down in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and related international and regional human rights instruments. It considers the application of international children’s rights at the national level and addresses key procedural and institutional matters concerning children’s rights implementation, including monitoring, complaints mechanisms, effective remedies, advocacy and international agenda-setting. The book breaks new ground by analysing a wide range of international children’s rights issues from a legal perspective. It incorporates a comparative perspective on children’s rights law at the international, regional and domestic level and contains information on evidence-based strategies towards the implementation and enforcement of international children’s rights law.
The book is targeted at academics, legal and other professionals, and advanced students. It analyses children’s rights law in the following areas: implementation and enforcement; advocacy and standard setting; complaints and remedies; the child and the family; adoption; alternative care; protection from violence; civil rights of the child; economic, social and cultural rights; education; health; migration and refugees; children and the justice system; children with disabilities; deprivation of liberty; children’s rights and digital technologies; war and disaster; sustainable development goals and further contemporary issues.

© Springer

 

Children’s Rights and the Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility

A Global Perspective

Children of almost any age can break the law, but at what age should children first face the possibility of criminal responsibility for their alleged crimes? This work is the first global analysis of national minimum ages of criminal responsibility (MACRs), the international legal obligations that surround them, and the principal considerations for establishing and implementing respective age limits. Taking an international children’s rights approach, with a rich theoretical framework and the vitality of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, this work maintains a critical perspective, such as in challenging the assumptions of many children’s rights scholars and advocates. Compiling the age limits and statutory sources for all countries, this book explains the broad historical origins behind most of them, identifying the recurring practical challenges that affect every country and providing the first comprehensive evidence that a general principle of international law requires all nations, regardless of their treaty ratifications, to establish respective minimum age limits.

© Routledge

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of children’s human rights, collecting the works of leading authorities as well as new scholars grappling with emerging ideas of ‘children’ and ‘rights.’ Beginning with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world, this book explores the theory, doctrine, and implementation of the legal frameworks addressing child labor, child soldiers, and child trafficking, as well as children’s socio-economic rights, including their rights to education.

© Edward Elgar Publishing

The African Report on Child Well-being 2018

Progress in the child-friendliness of African governments

This report tracks governments’ performance in improving the condition and wellbeing of children, and examines how countries are doing, for example, vis-à-vis their neighbours and over the years. We did this using the Child-Friendliness Index (CFI), a rights-based statistical methodology that ACPF developed and recently revised to measure, monitor and promote government performance in realising the rights and wellbeing of children.

This report draws attention to the fact that although many African governments have become child-friendly over the last ten years, there are equally many that are locked in the “less” or “least child-friendly” categories for many years now. Millions of children are therefore not benefitting from the legal protection they deserve and from the quality education, health and nutrition and minimum levels of social protection they very much need. It also draws attention to the widespread prevalence of disturbing levels of undernutrition and poor quality of education – the two major threats to the wellbeing of Africa’s children. The report therefore concludes with one exceptionally important and alarming message, namely that Africa is on the verge of a serious human development crisis with grave consequences for the social and economic wellbeing of its people and for the future of the continent.

© African Child Policy Forum

Children’s Rights

New Issues, New Themes, New Perspectives

This collection of essays by a variety of scholars, compiled to celebrate the silver anniversary of The International Journal of Children’s Rights, builds on work already in the literature to reveal where we are now at and how the law concerned with children is reacting to new developments. New, or relatively new subject matter is explored, such as film classification, intersex genital mutilation, the right to development. Rights within the context of sport are given an airing. We are offered new perspectives on discipline, on the significance of “rights flowing downhill,” on the so-called “General Principles.“ The uses to which the CRC is put in legal reasoning in some legal systems is critically examined. Though not intended as an audit, the collection offers a fascinating image of where the field of children’s right is at now, the progress that has been made, and what issues will require work in the future.

© Brill Publishers

 

Children’s Rights Law in the Global Human Rights Landscape

Isolation, Inspiration, Integration?

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.

© Routledge

Law and Childhood Studies

The Current Legal Issues series is based upon an annual colloquium held at University College London. Each year leading scholars from around the world gather to discuss the relationship between law and another discipline of thought. Each colloquium examines how the external discipline is conceived in legal thought and argument, how the law is pictured in that discipline, and analyses points of controversy in the use, and abuse, of extra-legal arguments within legal theory and practice. This book, the fourteenth volume in the Current Legal Issues series, offers an insight into the state of law and childhood studies scholarship today. Focusing on the inter-connections between the two disciplines, it addresses the key issues informing current debates. Topics include cyber bullying, children’s human rights, childhood in conflict-stricken areas, foster care, and parental discipline.

© Oxford University Press