Stockholm Studies in Child Law and Children’s Rights – serie

In Participation, Power and Attitudes: Implementing Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Rebecca Thorburn Stern analyses how CRC state parties describe their implementation of Article 12 on respect for the child’s views. The focus of the study is on if, and how, references to traditional attitudes are used by state parties to explain their actions and inactions when implementing this key right and principle. It is shown that 'traditional attitudes' are employed less as justification of poor implementation than as a way of allocating responsibility to the population rather than to the state party, and that references to tradition remain a mainly non-Western phenomenon, thus also overlooking the impact of traditional attitudes in Western societies.

Child-friendly Justice assesses how the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has affected the development of child law and the promotion of children’s rights in the past twenty-five years. Its 24 studies probe a broad variety of issues relating to children’ s contact with civil, administrative and criminal justice systems, the protection of child integrity and their right to participation, information and proper representation.The contributors - all experts on child-related matters - represent international organisations, academia and NGOs. They provide a clear picture of the origins of the current problems in realising child-friendly justice, and they discuss possible solutions.

How can human rights for children born outside their national jurisdiction with parents deemed as terrorists be safeguarded? In what ways do children risk being discriminated in their welfare rights in Sweden when treated as invisible part of a family? How can we do research on children’s rights in not just ethically sensitive ways but also with respect for children as rights subjects? And what could be a theory on social justice for children? These are questions discussed in studies from different disciplines concerning children’s international human rights, with a special focus on the realization of the CRC in Sweden.