Litigating Children’s Rights Affected by Armed Conflict Before the European Court of Human Rights

Author(s):  
Nuala Mole
Author(s):  
Wouter Vandenhole ◽  
Gamze Erdem Türkelli

The best interests of the child principle is considered a pillar of children’s rights law and, according to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), is to be a primary consideration in all actions concerning children. Yet best interests is an elusive concept and principle that has no single authoritative definition or description. Internationally and domestically relevant in such diverse areas as family law, adoption, migration, and socioeconomic policymaking, the best interests principle requires flexibility and is best served by a case-by-case approach, as has been recognized by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and the European Court of Human Rights. This chapter analyzes relevant international case law and suggests the use of a number of safeguards to prevent such requisite flexibility from presenting a danger of paternalism, bias, or misuse.


Global Jurist ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Salvador Santino Jr. Fulo Regilme ◽  
Elisabetta Spoldi

Abstract Despite the consolidated body of public international law on children’s rights and armed conflict, why do armed rebel groups and state forces deploy children in armed conflict, particularly in Somalia? First, due to the lack of alternative sources of income and livelihood beyond armed conflict, children join the army due to coercive recruitment by commanders of armed groups. Their participation in armed conflict generates a fleeting and false sense of material security and belongingness in a group. Second, many Somali children were born in an environment of existential violence and material insecurity that normalized and routinized violence, thereby motivating them to view enlistment in armed conflict as morally permissible and necessary for existential survival.


Author(s):  
Barbara Bennett Woodhouse

This chapter discusses the role played by human rights charters, such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the European Charter of Human Rights, and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, in establishing that children are not mere property of their parents but persons with their own independent rights to protection of family relationships and family identity. The chapter identifies specific provisions in these charters relevant to children’s family rights. It then examines various decisions of the European Court of Human Rights that address claims of violations of children’s rights to family in contexts including adoption, child protection, family reunification, access to birth records, and immigration, and that define appropriate remedies. The chapter closes by highlighting the growing threat to children’s rights to know and be cared for by their families posed by the populist backlash in wealthier nations against migrants fleeing war, violence, and poverty.


Author(s):  
Mykola Bondaruk ◽  
Serhiy H. Melenko ◽  
Liubov Omelchuk ◽  
Liliya Radchenko ◽  
Anzhela Levenets

The objective of the research is to analyze the main violations of children's rights within the European Convention on Human Rights to highlight the basic positions of the European Court of Human Rights ECHR on their protection, as well as to determine the advisability of applying the practice of this court by the European states. The methodological basis of the work consists of different methods, such as analysis and synthesis, dialectical, logical-legal and formal-legal. The result of this work allowed identifying the role of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights as a source of European law and its importance for the protection of the rights of the child, interpreting the legal positions established in the pertinent decisions of the said court and comparing them, to justify the need for your careful observation of the practice of the ECHR in the application of the law. It is concluded that the practice of the ECHR is recognized as a source of law in most states. And although the Ukrainian legal tradition does not recognize the status of judicial precedent as a source of law, such precedents are actively used in everyday legal activity.


2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 548-574
Author(s):  
Anette Faye Jacobsen

Legal research has shown mixed results regarding the application of a child-centred approach in judgments from the European Court of Human Rights. With an interdisciplinary perspective, however, a number of remarkable features become visible.This article explores case law from the European system with a blended methodology. First, a quantitative assessment of the Court’s judgments over the last decade reveals, surprisingly, that the child’s best interests doctrine has become widely used only recently, despite the principle being invoked as early as 1988. Secondly, an in-depth discourse analysis of selected landmark cases shows how the child-centred approach, in certain types of case, has gained status as the paramount consideration to the extent that it may sideline competing principles in the balancing exercise of adjudication. In the conclusion, the two types of enquiries, the statistical and the qualitative scrutiny of judgments, are combined to offer an assessment of the power of children’s rights alongside other interests in the European human rights machinery.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 46-50
Author(s):  
Nadezhda Efimova

This article explores the concept of child-friendly justice and its main characteristics. The article analyzes the regulatory framework for the introduction of the term "child-friendly justice" that exists in national and international legislation. The practice of the European Court of Human Rights is summarized, and the main characteristics of friendly justice are characterized. At the end of the article is concluded that the concept of child-friendly justice is the unique and universal for the development of approaches to protecting children’s rights in different types of legal proceedings and development of uniform standards for implementation of their interests.


2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (38) ◽  
pp. 339-345
Author(s):  
Sylvie Langlaude

On 24 February 2005 the House of Lords delivered a significant judgment on freedom of religion, parental rights to religious freedom, corporal punishment and children's rights. This paper examines R (Williamson) v Secretary of State for Education and Employment. It argues that the House of Lords adopts a much more generous approach to freedom of religion or belief than the European Court of Human Rights. But it is also critical of the argument derived from children's rights.


Author(s):  
Claire Fenton-Glynn

One of the most prolific areas of jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights relates to private law disputes concerning children: the extent of parental authority; custody and residence; access and contact; parental child abduction; as well as the procedural rules that accompany them. This chapter explores how these have come before the Court, and the ways in which children’s rights have been conceptualised, both in the applications themselves and in the Court’s decision-making. It also examines the rules of standing to bring a case on behalf of a child, as well as the right to represent the child before the Court, and argues that the current rules provide inadequate protection for the rights of children.


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