Introduction

The child’s right to participate in family law proceedings is provided by multiple international and European human rights sources, as also recognized by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in the quote above. The cradle of the right to participate was the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC); subsequently in the European legal realm, the child’s right was mirrored in new binding instruments (the European Convention on the Exercise of Children’s Rights (ECECR) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CFREU)) and soft law instruments (the Guidelines on Child-Friendly Justice (GCFJ) and the Recommendation on the participation of children). More interestingly, as Part II of this volume has shown, the child’s right to participation has also ‘come of age’ as a right under Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) through the case law of the ECtHR. These developments regarding the child’s right to participation over the past 30 years are an example of the ‘widening’ and ‘thickening’ of human rights. The adoption of new instruments, such as the ECECR and the CFREU, and the recognition of the right to participation in the case law of the ECtHR led to the ‘widening’ of the right at the international and regional levels. Through the widening, the right also thickens, as European states are now bound to provide for the child’s right to participation under multiple instruments. In other words, the accumulation of international and European human rights instruments addressing the child’s right to participate in family law proceedings has strengthened the right, but has also led to diverging interpretations of the right. The latter makes the comparison of these instruments an exciting endeavour.