Interlinkages between the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the European Court of Human Rights

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is undoubtedly the most influential and specialized international instrument aimed at protecting children’s rights. When it comes to securing state compliance with children’s rights, on the other hand, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is arguably one of the most powerful mechanisms.

There has been rich research over the last decades exploring the impact of child rights perspectives on the jurisprudence of the Court. Not surprisingly, most studies in the field takes a legal approach when assessing the Court’s will and ability to include the child’s interests in its considerations and decisions. Scholars may differ in their conclusions as to what degree the Ct sufficiently balances child interests with other stakeholders but the judicial tradition’s case-by-case assessment methodology fails to establish general features of the Court’s practise in a wider context of socio-political trends.

This article takes stock of the influence of the child rights approach, including of the CRC, on the ECtHRs judgments from an interdisciplinary angle involving law as well as political and social science. The analyses seeks to assess the Court’s application of a child rights perspective, including specific child rights instruments quantitatively and qualitatively. As one would expect, the results are contradictory and complex. The quantitative measuring of the Court’s deliberations shows a very limited involvement of the CRC and the interpretive soft law generated from the Committee of the Rights of the Child, even though some expansion appears over the decades since the CRC was adopted. The qualitative analyses, on the other hand, documents that the child rights approach has established itself as the hegemonic discourse in cases involving children, where the Court undertakes to balance competing interests against one another. This hegemony of children’s rights overriding other considerations does not appear wholly consistently and uniformly in all decisions from the Court. Nonetheless, the analyses contends that the child rights discourse has gained the power to side-line well-established ECtHR doctrines as well as current political pressure on the European human rights machinery more broadly.

The article is completed during the autumn 2015 and is targeted at an international or regional human rights journal.