Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the number of cases being brought before national courts addressing the constitutional rights of children and future generations (FG) in the context of environmental protection. These cases have required courts to devote increasing attention to a wide-ranging and complicated array of constitutional rights claims involving the short- and longer-term impacts of environmental harm on children and FG. This article argues that both litigation and judicial efforts in this area have been hampered by the lack of precision of definitions of ‘future generations’ under comparative constitutional and international human rights law, in particular vis-à-vis children. This lack of precision poses a major challenge to both the delineation and enforcement of rights claims in the context of such litigation. After outlining how these cases are being brought and how courts are addressing (or not) the complexities involved in defining children and FG respectively, the article highlights the lack of authoritative definitions of FG in comparative constitutional law – a lacuna that, the author argues, is exacerbated by the ongoing lack of a clear definition of FG in the international human rights law context. The article concludes by identifying key challenges faced by litigators and courts seeking to engage with the rights of children and FG that result from this definitional gap.

For societies transitioning from conflict to peace, the phenomenon of child soldiers poses significant challenges. These include quandaries associated with assisting in the reintegration of serving child soldiers, determining how to prevent future recruitment of child soldiers, and pursuing accountability of those who utilize child soldiers. In addition, questions are also raised as to whether and how child soldiers responsible for crimes committed during conflict are to be held to account. While no one mechanism or response can adequately and sufficiently address the multifaceted issues that arise, peace agreements, as foundational documents that serve as the blueprint for peacebuilding and the post-conflict State, can make a useful contribution to some or all of them. Drawing on all references to child soldiers in 77 peace agreements signed between 1990 and 2022, this article examines the ways in which peace agreements address the issue of child soldiers.

This paper examines the current legal framework in relation to minors who are the recipients of exorcism. Such individuals are ordinarily doubly marginalised, by virtue of their membership of a minority religious or cultural community and their disempowered position as children. This piece aims to assess whether the current arrangements strike an appropriate balance between respecting personal and collective autonomy, as well as protecting vulnerable young people, paying particular attention to the impact of their intersectional position and multiple marginalising factors at play. It seeks to define exorcism and emphasise the very diverse settings in which it arises within twenty-first-century England and Wales. It examines proposals being made for a blanket prohibition in relation to children, considering both the desirability and viability of a ban. It also highlights that exorcism is not the only context in which religious minors will find themselves in a position of multiple marginalisation, and explores what debates in this area might reveal about the wider operation of Article 9 and the ECHR.

Well-being and protection of all children have widely been associated with universal rights. Simultaneously, though, there is growing advocacy for a right of children to work to live. Drawing on cultural relativist premises, such advocacy strongly correlates with an acceptance of poverty as a condition that is inevitable or simply ‘given’. We advance an argument against a right of children to work to live. The fact that only poor children are compelled to work should direct analyses to the causes of poverty. A critical engagement with the politics of development is necessary as it is often constitutive of relations of impoverishment. We critique Eurocentric perspectives that advocate for child labour and substantiate our argument by drawing on the case example of Bolivia, which lowered the legal age for child labour, only to eventually retract this decision. We demonstrate the link between neoliberal development and a rapid increase in the number of children forced to work to live since the 1980s. The case for a right of children to work to live is not justifiable; but there is a case for abolishing child labour and upholding the right of all children and their families to live in dignity. Poverty is not ‘another culture’.

In 1975, the world-famous novelist Yaşar Kemal (1923–2015) undertook a series of journalistic interviews with street children in Istanbul. The series, entitled “Children Are Human” (Çocuklar İnsandır), reflects the author's rebellious attitude as well as the revolutionary spirit of hope in the 1970s in Turkey. Kemal's ethnographic fieldwork with street children criticized the demotion of children to a less-than-human status when present among adults. He approached children's rights from a human rights angle, stressing the humanity of children and that children's rights are human rights. The methodological contribution of this research to the history of children and youth is its engagement with ethnography as historical source. His research provided children the opportunity to express their political subjectivities and their understanding of the major political questions of the time, specifically those of social justice, (in)equality, poverty, and ethnic violence encountered in their everyday interactions with politics in the country. Yaşar Kemal's fieldwork notes and transcribed interviews also bring to light immense injustices within an intersectional framework of age, class, ethnicity, and gender. The author emphasizes that children's political agency and their political protest is deeply rooted in their subordination and misery, but also in their dreams and hopes. Situating Yaşar Kemal's “Children Are Human” in the context of the 1970s in Turkey, I hope to contribute to childhood studies with regard to the political agency of children as well as to the history of public intellectuals and newspapers in Turkey and to progressive representations of urban marginalization.

Decisional privacy offers individuals the freedom to act and to make important decisions about how they live their lives, without unjustifiable interference from other individuals or the state. Children's perceived vulnerability, incapacity for rational decision-making and dependence on adults have been used to justify depriving children of decisional privacy rights and subjecting them to the exercise of adult power over the conditions of their lives. The aim of this paper is to articulate a theory of children's decisional privacy. It is argued that decisional privacy is valued as a condition that enables individual autonomy. A relational, gradual conception of autonomy is advanced, to explain how children can be recognised as having the capacity for autonomy, and in some circumstances, actual autonomy. This paper presents four fundamental principles of a children's rights approach to decisional privacy, which collectively serve to enhance children's meaningful participation in decision-making about their best interests, consistently with children's evolving capacities and the receipt of appropriate parental direction and guidance. The theory developed in this paper presents an opportunity for adult decision-makers to reflect upon how they make decisions for and about children, and how children can play a meaningful role in those decision-making processes.

It is an accepted principle of domestic and international law and policy that the welfare or best interests of the child must be the primary or paramount consideration in any decision made with regard to that child's upbringing. While this ‘best interests standard’ has become a core principle of welfare law, what might constitute a child or young person's best interests is given very little formal shape or content. This has provoked sustained criticism from practitioners, academics and the judiciary. In response, this paper argues that the capabilities approach can give best interests assessments much needed normative content, thereby addressing many of the criticisms directed towards the standard. The approach provides a theoretically nuanced framework for theorising about basic social justice and for evaluation, deliberation, and policy development across social welfare sectors. In arguing for a capabilities approach to best interests assessments, the paper sets out an agenda for change. It addresses the conceptual and methodological justifications for this change, and explores the empirical work that would be required. It identifies the steps and underlying principles necessary for a best interests process aligned with the capabilities approach, providing the necessary foundations for a radical reconceptualisation of best interests processes.

Almost everyone accepts that parents must provide a good enough upbringing in order to retain custodial rights over children, but little has been said about how that level should be set. In this paper, I examine ways of specifying a good enough upbringing. I argue that the two dominant ways of setting this level, the Best Interests and Abuse and Neglect Views, are mistaken. I defend the Dual Comparative View, which holds that an upbringing is good enough when shortfalls from the best alternative upbringing in terms of the child's interests are no more significant than the parents' interest.

This article presents a normative framework for the assessment of education policies and applies it to the issue of schools’ selecting their students on the basis of religious criteria. Such policies can be justified, and challenged, on many different grounds; public debate is not conducted in terms adequate to the task. The authors’ main objectives are to supplement with non-consequentialist considerations a recent, consequentialist, approach to the normative assessment of education policy proposed by Brighouse et al. (2016, 2018), and to apply the proposed framework to issues of school composition and selection. They argue, further, that policies allowing schools to select all their students on the basis of their parents’ religious affiliation cannot be justified.

The principles of the best interest of children and subsidiarity constitute the conceptual foundation of the Convention on Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (HCIA). Subsidiarity in the HCIA dictates a priority for domestic adoption placements for children over intercountry adoption. This article argues against subsidiarity on two fronts. First, the analysis shows that the in-principle priority of domestic adoption cannot be justified on the basis of either heritage rights or state sovereignty. Second, the principle of subsidiarity in the HCIA is a procedural principle, one that stipulates the political/geographical location of the placement of children through a priority ordering. This does not comport with the principle of subsidiarity as it has been conceptualized in ethics and social philosophy, which gives normative structure to the process of decision-making by stipulating the proper level for decisional authority. Subsidiarity in this original sense holds that decisions regarding child welfare should be made at the lowest level possible, by those most affected by the decisions, unless doing so would not be the most suited to protecting and promoting the best interests of children. Appealing to subsidiarity in this theoretical version reveals at least two significant problems with HCIA placement policy and leads to the conclusion that subsidiarity in the HCIA must be formally revised as a structural principle of ethics that will not support the general priority of domestic adoption.

The domestication of child-related treaties is not a straightforward process in Nigeria. Unlike treaties with another thematic focus, the majority of constituent states must give their full consent before any child-related instrument may be domesticated at the federal level and subsequently re-enacted in the domestic states. In many ways, the plural legal orders in the country and the differing perceptions of childhood make consensus difficult to achieve in terms of child rights legislation. In this regard, even though the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has been domesticated (through a contestable procedure), 11 of Nigeria's 36 constituent states have failed to re-enact the domesticating instrument. This study elaborates on this problem, and then examines some instruments that are not affected by the domestication challenges and may offer useful protection to children with regard to certain sectoral aspects, especially child labour and child trafficking.

This paper sets out the findings of an exploratory study that, drawing on the so-called ‘new sociology of childhood’, has theorised the child as a competent social actor and conjectured that, on this basis, whilst they might lack formal legal capacity, children may nevertheless possess legal capability. Taking a child-first (as opposed to a law-first) approach, the study has sought to assess children's legal understanding using digital gaming as a research tool. We have identified as an area of particular strength children's attitudes to gender equality, and we have determined that many children demonstrate competency to deal with consumer-related issues appropriately. However, at the other extreme, we have established that children demonstrate considerable uncertainty concerning the levels of force that adult authority figures are permitted to exercise over them. We have found in the course of this study that children are competent and willing to express their views on matters that concern them. However, they do not expect to be invited to do this in their day-to-day lives. Related to this we have found a vast lack of awareness among children concerning the rights afforded to them under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Children are one of the most vulnerable groups in almost any population because of their physical and emotional dependence on adults and social status. Their vulnerability is greater in many developing countries because of the higher incidence of poverty and nascent social protection mechanisms. Social protection can serve as a tool to perpetuate inequities or can be used to promote human rights, equality, and inclusiveness. This paper looks at how social protection evolving in four developing countries, Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, affects the realization of children's rights. Each country's social protection efforts are analyzed according to the type of effort and then compared to indicators measuring the realization of children's rights. The analysis indicates that well-coordinated social protection systems with wide coverage that include social assistance, social insurance, as well as human capital and empowerment efforts are more likely to result in the progressive realization of children's rights.

The rapid expansion of international commercial surrogacy arrangements has created serious ethical and legal dilemmas with respect to the nationality and parentage of children conceived under such arrangements and the potential exploitation of surrogate mothers. This paper examines these dilemmas through the prism of international human rights law to assess whether a prohibitionist or permissive approach should be adopted with respect to this practice.