Protection of Children's Human Rights in Europe

This book examines three core foci of interest of both practitioners as well as academics in the area of the protection of human rights of children. The first two are the international legal documents of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). The third focal point consists of an investigation into a specific area of jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights regarding the protection of human rights of children: the phenomenon of the corporal punishment and abuse of children in the UK. The analysis concludes that both the CRC and the ECHR are characterised by various flaws and drawbacks in relation to the protection of children's human rights. The narrow textual scope of the ECHR and the significant weaknesses of the CRC regarding its implementation mechanism are two prominent examples. The paper suggests that in Europe, the trend of maximising the potential of the ECHR by combining the widely accepted, detailed standards on children's rights set out in the UN Convention with the highly successful system of individual petition and implementation should be strengthened further.