Rights of the Child

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General Comment No.26 on Children and the Environment – A Milestone in International Human Rights Law?

22 August 2023 saw the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child publish its much-anticipated General Comment No.26 on Children’s Rights and the Environment, with a Special Focus on Climate Change (GC26). The General Comment sets out a framework for a child rights-based approach to environmental protection, addressing issues ranging from access to justice and remedies in the context of environmental harm to delineating child rights-consistent measures that states must take to ensure climate change mitigation and adaptation. It has attracted a flurry of publicity, and rightly so. This post will look at the origins of the GC26, the process leading up to its adoption, and the elements of the document that are of particular significance with regard to the evolution not just of children’s rights law but also of IHRL more generally.

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The Moscow Mechanism Expert Report on the Forcible Transfer and Deportation of Ukrainian Children

Before Spring 2022, only the real connoisseurs of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were familiar with the so-called Moscow Mechanism enabling any OSCE participating State to request the establishment of an ad hoc expert mission to investigate specific questions related to the OSCE human dimension. In the first thirty years of…

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Ireland’s Birth Information and Tracing Act: Reconciling the Right to Identity

Introduction On the 30th of June 2022 Ireland enacted the Birth Information and Tracing Act – legislation which for the first time in Irish history enshrines a ‘clear right to full birth, early life, care and medical information for all those with questions on their origins’. When the law comes into force on October…

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The Children are the Future – Or Not? Exploring The Complexities of the Relationship between the Rights of Children and Future Generations

This piece addresses an issue of growing importance in international human rights law (IHRL): namely, the relationship between children’s rights and future generations’ rights. This matter is particularly pressing in the context of the growing body of standard-setting, scholarship and practice in the areas of climate justice and environmental protection. However, it has also been a longer-standing (albeit…

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A Handy Illusion? Interpretation of the ‘Unlikely to Bring Effective Relief’ Limb of Article 7(e) OPIC by the CRC in Saachi et. al.

In an EJIL Talk! blog post, Aoife Nolan laid out the salient aspects of the five inadmissibility decisions in Saachi et al. v. Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany and Turkey delivered by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on 8 October 2021. Her post focussed on how the Committee handled key…

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