Children's Rights

Aim

After completion of the course, the student should on an advanced level be able to:

• compare various categories of children’s rights;
• account for different philosophical arguments in relation to children’s rights;
• critically review children’s rights in relation to perspectives universality, cultural relativism or sustainable development;
• analyse the ways in which children’s rights may be at conflict with the interests of other groups;
• analyse the ways in which children’s rights can be assigned varying meanings by different groups and in various contexts.

Content

The introduction to the course will give a historical background to today’s international agreements on children’s rights, as well as identify and elaborate on the differences between various categories of children’s rights. Furthermore, the course provides a survey of various theories on rights and the philosophical arguments in favour of and against the special rights of children. The course comprises a thorough discussion of how children’s rights are related to other closely related concepts such as children’s needs, the best interest of the child, children’s participation and children’s perspectives. All this is dealt with in relation to specific contexts such as education, the family, migration, sustainable development and from the perspective of specific articles in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Furthermore, the course will relate the existence of international conventions on children’s rights to a broader discussion on universalism and cultural relativism, and thus touch upon the criticism that can be levied upon a universal definition of children’s rights and how such criticism may be dealt with. Finally, the course addresses the question of in what ways the best interests of the child may be at conflict with the interests of other groups as well as the ways in which various groups can define “the best interests of the child” in different ways.