The Roles of Independent Children’s Rights Institutions in Advancing Human Rights of Children

Independent children’s rights institutions (ICRIs) have been established across the world. Endorsed by the UN, they are independent of their governments and endowed with legal powers. Yet we know little about how ICRIs function. How do they work? What impacts their success? What objectives do ICRIs seek to achieve?

The contributors to this edited collection provide first-hand experiences in directing, working for, and studying ICRIs and detail their unique, in-depth accounts of factors shaping ICRIs’ efforts to monitor and advance children’s rights. Chapters examine ICRIs in Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Pakistan, and the United States, as well as an extraordinary network of ICRIs, and introduce innovative ideas of how to think about ICRIs’ independence and legal powers. Offering perspectives from across the world, this volume provides both theoretical and practical insights on a crucial element of children’s rights, independent children’s rights institutions.

The Roles of Independent Children’s Rights Institutions in Advancing Human Rights of Children is essential reading for students, researchers, and scholars interested in studies of sociology of childhood, law and society, children’s rights, and human rights.

Agnes Lux worked in the Hungarian Office of the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights (Ombudsman) as deputy head of department. She is an International Visitor Leadership Program alumna, selected to participate in the program of the U.S. State Department ("Children in the U.S. Justice"). Lux worked as child rights education and advocacy director of the UNICEF Hungary. Currently she is a research fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences, Hungary.

Brian Gran is a professor on the faculty of Case Western Reserve University and Jefferson Science Fellow of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He is the author of The Sociology of Children’s Rights. Gran’s scholarship concentrates on human rights, law, and social policy.