Child Labour in the Global Human Rights Regime: A Political Economy Perspective

Child Labour in the Global Human Rights Regime is about children’s rights, child labour and child slavery in modern and modernizing societies in the context of what has been summarized as a well-established and increasingly sophisticated framework of treaties, institutions, networks and ambitious standards with respect to human rights.

The main focus is on the implications of children’s forced labour within compulsory systems of formal education, or schooling, that have been spreading around the world as an integral feature of economic, political and cultural globalization towards a single global-reach social space. It is argued that children’s forced educational labour appears to qualify as slave labour in terms of prevailing notions of ‘slavery’ in international human rights and humanitarian law, social policy frameworks, theoretical discourses, and widely held everyday, common sense perspectives.

Paul Close is an Affiliate Researcher in the Childhood, Youth and Sport cluster of the School of Education, Childhood, Youth and Sport (ECYS), Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELS), Open University (OU), UK.