Age Discrimination and Children's Rights (International Studies in Human Rights, 86)

One of the aims of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is to accord due recognition to the fact that 'the child, by reason of his phsyical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth'.
However, a question mark hangs over the extent to which 'special safeguards and care' can negatively impact on the rights of the child and result in discrimination against the child in the guise of 'his physical and mental immaturity'. This volume explores the extent to which children's rights are secured at the national level; and the reasons why children's rights have or have not been recognised and secured by various states at the level of domestic law. It also explores the difficulties inherent in the accordance of rights to children in order to ascertain whether they do in fact derive from the particular nature of children or whether they mask a reluctance of states to fulfil their domestic and international rights obligations to children, and whether such reluctance constitutes 'discrimination against children'. The volume thus explores the theoretical and legal underpinnings of gender and race discrimination, at both the domestic and international level, and examines the extent to which these may be applied to the area of children's rights.

Claire Breen is a Lecturer at the School of Law of the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She graduated from the National University of Ireland, University College Cork, and holds a doctorate from the University of Nottingham. She has published widely in the area of children's rights and is the author of The Standard of the Best Interests of the Child (Martinus Nijhoff, 2002).