Comparing Children's Rights: Introducing the Children's Rights Index

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Gran

AbstractChildren's rights continue to be subject of international debates. Moving past these debates can be facilitated with an international measure of children's rights. This article introduces the Children's Rights Index, an international measure of children's rights for over 190 countries. The Children's Rights Index consists of two civil rights, two political rights, two social rights, and two economic rights. This article presents country scores on the Children's Rights Index, then examines whether children's rights vary by region and other differences, such as country wealth. It is hoped that the Children's Rights Index will provide evidence on children's rights important to the work of governments and nongovernmental organizations, as well as scholars and others concerned about children's welfare.

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-89
Author(s):  
Amy Risley

This article argues that social issues are central to the children’s rights movement in Argentina. For more than a decade, child advocates have traced the plight of children to poverty, marginality, and neoliberal economic reforms. In particular, they have framed the issue of child welfare as closely related to socioeconomic conditions, underscored the “perverse” characteristics of the country’s existing institutions and policies, and called for reforms that accord with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Although the country’s policies are gradually being transformed due to a landmark child-protection law passed in 2005, a dramatically more progressive framework for children’s rights has not yet been adopted. Given that policymakers have largely failed to reverse the trends that activists perceive as harming children, it is expected that advocates will continue to criticise the gap between domestic realities and the social and economic rights included in the Convention.


2021 ◽  
pp. 141-160
Author(s):  
Richard P. Hiskes

This concluding chapter begins with a discussion of how the global coronavirus pandemic called attention to children’s rights issues, specifically in how children were not allowed to participate in decisions directly affecting their “best interests,” as required by CRC. Granting children human rights will fundamentally alter the nature of both democracy and human rights. Giving children citizenship rights will renew democracy, as past enfranchisements have, but also will push democracies to resemble less Western, liberal models. Group rights will predominate in democracies where children are full citizens. Also, the human rights agendas of child-incorporating democracies will be dominated by social and economic rights issues, since children’s rights of protection and provision will be given priority. Finally, children’s participation rights will emerge as crucial in diminishing structural inequality in democratic societies, providing a pathway to a fuller form of social justice predicated on the human rights of children.


Author(s):  
William F. Felice

Economic rights refer to the right to property, the right to work, and the right to social security. Social rights are those entitlements necessary for an adequate standard of living, including rights to food, housing, health, and education. Since economic rights have a social basis, and social rights have an economic basis, both classifications are considered of equal importance and interdependent. The intellectual and social dimensions of economic and social rights have evolved from at least four spheres: religion, philosophy, politics, and law. Throughout history, individuals and groups debated and accepted obligations to help the needy and prevent suffering. There were both religious and secular dimensions to these undertakings. Early human rights advocates moreover proclaimed an interdependence between civil and political rights and economic and social rights and criticized those who made too sharp a distinction between them. A central debate over economic and social rights relates to their legal validity. Some scholars argue that by their very nature, economic and social rights are not “justiciable.” Another issue is the link between economic and social rights in meeting basic human needs and the alleviation of global poverty. The right to development is also important in debates on economic and social rights, as it attempts to correct the economic distortions left by the legacy of colonial domination. Perhaps the most promising new approach to economic and social rights is Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, which focuses on what individuals need for adequate functioning.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 595-612 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anandini Dar ◽  
John Wall

AbstractWhile children's rights have made significant gains in recent decades, children and youth continue to wield relatively little power in determining the nature of their societies' rights as such. This article sets out to explore what it might mean for children to enjoy genuine political representation. While it is often acknowledged that children should possess political rights to participation, voice, and citizenship, we argue that there is a need also for their more specific right to representation in democratic government. Furthermore, this right can be realized only if the very notion of representation is rethought along post-modern lines in light of children's particular experiences: as a right not so much to exercise autonomy as to make a political difference. The article examines recent movements toward children's involvement in policy-making, children's parliaments, and children's voting, and then makes practical proposals for enabling children's fuller representational empowerment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 748-777
Author(s):  
Seamus Byrne

Abstract Any discussion on children’s socio-economic rights should not overlook their means of fulfilment; namely, the principle of progressive realisation and the legal duties arising therefrom. This article argues that from a children’s rights perspective, this principle has remained legally and operationally underdeveloped by the Committee on the Rights of the Child. This can be seen from their failure sufficiently to engage with, and address, the obligations imposed by progressive realisation in their General Comments and in their Concluding Observations on state practice issued under the Convention’s reporting process. This article argues that the cumulative consequence of these failings is that the Committee has peripheralised this important legal obligation within children’s rights scholarship and has ultimately undermined its ability to achieve its full legal potential in enhancing children’s socio-economic rights. In advocating for the promulgation of a revised General Comment on the General Measures of Implementation, it demonstrates how children’s rights can meaningfully reconnect with the principle in a more consequential way.


2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 619-635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Quennerstedt

AbstractIn this paper, the widespread use of the "3 p's", provision, protection and participation, to categorise children's rights is critically examined. This conceptualisation is argued to have hampering effects on research in children's rights, in that it frames the research in a problematic way and hinders the possibilities of attaining theoretically driven analyses. In the paper, the emergence and use of the 3 p's is first traced and discussed. Thereafter, an alternative language for constructing and analysing children's rights is proposed, namely the vocabulary used for general human rights: civil, political and social rights. When children's rights are placed within the development of human rights and conceptualised accordingly, a different understanding of the content of children's rights surfaces. The theoretical contextualisation that is then added is suggested as a way of approaching contradictions and conflicts surrounding children's rights issues with more theoretical depth and nuances.


PRANATA HUKUM ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-182
Author(s):  
Yulia Hesti ◽  
Risna Intiza

Family is the smallest government, where there are problems or conflicts that occur in both parenting, protection, supervision, education and giving freedom in choosing skills, favorites that can be developed and applied in society and for the future. Seeing more and more cases of bullying, violence in schools and in the community is growing, worrying parents. Based on that background, the formulation of the problem is whether the Principles and Policies in The Development of ChildrenWorthy Cities based on the Regulation of the Minister of State for Women Empowerment and Child Protection on Child Development Policy No. 11 of 2011. Based on Article 5, it affirms that the government in creating programs and policies that put children's rights first, both to grow and develop children because the current growth of the child will have an impact on their lives in the future. Give breadth so that the child can give his opinion according to his point of view, because we do not know that there is a great potential that exists on each side of the child. Children are the next generation of the nation, the pride of every parent and family, who must be looked after and protected as best they can. Under Article 6, its policy governs a. civil rights and freedoms; b. family environment and alternative parenting; c. basic health and well-being; d. education, leisure use, and cultural activities; and e. special protection. The principles in government management must be transparency, accountability, participation, information disclosure, and legal supremacy, and not discrimination or discriminating between tribes, races, cultures and others. The policy on children's rights is a civil right in which the right to identity is the child hasa birth certificate.


2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Keith Grodsky

AbstractThe most recent spate of ‘democratic revolutions’, ushering in the fourth wave of democratization, seems to lend support to those advocating for the primacy of political and civil rights, over economic, cultural and social ones, in the human rights framework. In this article, I challenge that idea, arguing instead that the most recent regime changes, like so many that have preceded them, were, if anything, more about economic rights than political ones. I reassess not only the most recent ‘revolutions’, but also those that took place over the course of the 20th century, showing commonalities among the human rights goals of communists, anti-communists and contemporary pro-democracy leaders. By framing these various revolutionaries as human rights agents, and mass publics as their allies, this article is designed to engage readers in a debate about what, if any, sorts of rights truly hold primacy. The difference between today’s pro-democracy leaders and yesterday’s communist ones rests on the perceived international legitimacy of the democratic template. Yet all of these leaders, I argue, have essentially struggled for political change not as an end, but as a means to improved economic rights.


Author(s):  
Liz Griffith

Chapter 3 provides a critical perspective on the establishment of the Council of Europe and its development of human rights mechanisms amongst Western European powers during the Cold War. It discusses attempts to address the lack of coverage of social and economic rights in the ECHR, with the development of the European Social Charter and the Committee of Social Rights and looks at the Council of Europe’s differing approaches to civil and political rights (and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights) and the social and economic rights contained in the Social Charter (with oversight by the Committee of Social Rights). It outlines some of the strengths and weaknesses relating to enforcement and realisability of these differing sets of rights.


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