Children’s Rights
A Theoretical Analysis
Can children have rights? Can very young children have rights? What kind of legal theory regards children as rights holders despite their limited capacity to exert their rights and make rational choices? This chapter addresses these questions and introduces the rights terminology used throughout the book, namely, a needs-based, relational human rights approach. Within the human rights context, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) offers an authoritative and compelling Bill of Rights for children, and is thus used as the normative template for children’s rights. Six CRC provisions are most relevant to child victims: the four `guiding principles’ of Best Interests, Participation, Development and Equality, and two victim-related articles, the right to protection and the right to rehabilitation. The chapter ends with a graphic visualization of the interrelations between these six human rights principles, which is the first layer of the full needs-rights model.
Keywords: children’s rights, human rights, convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Interest Theory, will theory, participation, equality, best-interests, development
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .