Peleg: Illusion of inclusion: challenging universalistic conceptions in international children’s rights law

Noam Peleg (Univ. of New South Wales - Law) has posted Illusion of inclusion: challenging universalistic conceptions in international children’s rights law (Australian Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 24, no. 3, 2018). Here's the abstract:

This paper examines the nexus between two allegedly contesting objectives of international children’s rights law: protection and empowerment. It focuses on child labour movements as a case study to examine this tension. The paper shows that when children make demands that exceed imaginary boundaries of protection, their voices are dismissed on the basis of immaturity. Therefore, the paper argues that the failure of international children’s rights law to acknowledge the ways in which childhood can unfold in more than one way results in the dominance of paternalistic approaches to children’s agency. These approaches inherently limit this body of law from providing comprehensive rights protection for every child.