How are children’s rights (mis)interpreted in practice? The EU, children’s rights and policy narratives’

International children’s rights and principles are enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). All EU Member States are parties to the CRC, and therefore, they are legally bound to translate its key principles and provisions into concrete legislative and policy measures. Amongst the fundamental child rights principles, the best interests of the child (Art.3 CRC) and child participation (Art.12 CRC) are the most complex and challenging to implement in practice. More recently, the EU, under the leadership of the European Commission, has endorsed the promotion of children’s rights as one of its overarching policy objectives. This chapter will assess how successful the EU institutions have been in interpreting ‘child participation’ and ‘the best interests of the child’ in concrete policy terms. By focusing on the European Commission, this chapter will examine the extent to which policy narratives have shaped the meanings attached to these two child rights principles in relation to concrete policy measures and instruments. It will be shown that the interpretations and misinterpretations attached to these child rights principles amount to a narrow and tokenistic approach, whereby the EU institutions merely pays lip service to CRC principles, despite their formal embrace of these principles in key EU legal and policy documents.

best interests of the child, children’s rights , child participation , European Commission , policy narratives

Palgrave Macmillan

Iusmen, Ingi

696395c1-d60e-4fbd-aa2b-98aeecaa64b2

Rhodes, Rod

Iusmen, Ingi

696395c1-d60e-4fbd-aa2b-98aeecaa64b2

Rhodes, Rod

Iusmen, Ingi (2018) How are children’s rights (mis)interpreted in practice? The EU, children’s rights and policy narratives’. In, Rhodes, Rod (ed.) Narrative Policy Analysis - Cases in Decentred Policy. Basingstoke. Palgrave Macmillan. (In Press)