An interview with Wouter Vandenhole, Gamze Erdem Türkelli, and Sara Lembrechts about the second edition of their Commentary on the Convention on the Rights of the Child
Our members, Wouter Vandenhole (University of Antwerp), Gamze Erdem Türkelli (University of Antwerp), and Sara Lembrechts (Ghent University), talk about the second edition of their Commentary on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Edward Elgar, 2024).
Q: What is this book about?
The thoroughly updated second edition of the Commentary on the Convention on the Rights of the Child presents a comprehensive legal perspective on the inherently interdisciplinary field of children’s rights. Chapters provide an article-by-article analysis of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, including its Optional Protocols, as well as contextualised advice on the interpretation and implementation of its provisions.
The basis of the conceptual framework used in this Commentary is a holistic, contextualised approach to children’s rights in which children’s agency, resilience and vulnerability coexist. This coexistence requires to take both vulnerabilities experienced by children and their agency and resilience into account when analysing their rights under the Convention.
The Commentary critically engages with the Convention, exploring its position within the wider context of human rights law. Where relevant, the Commentary also inspects perspectives from other fields of law, such as labour law, private law, family law or criminal law, in providing a concise but comprehensive interpretation of any given provision. Insights from other disciplines, such as the sociology of childhood, international relations and anthropology, are included as well. Engagement with disciplines beyond the law is beneficial in a legal commentary such as the present one because it allows an appraisal of legal norms embodied in the CRC and its OPs against the backdrop of political, social, economic and anthropological realities as well as the plethora of children’s experiences across the globe.
Q: What is new to the second edition?
This second edition introduces several updates and enhancements compared to the first edition that marked the CRC’s 30th anniversary in 2019.
The Introduction has been thoroughly updated to address contemporary challenges and opportunities in the field of children's rights. The revised Introduction reflects the evolving landscape and emerging issues affecting children globally. New material includes, amongst other themes, children’s rights in the digital environment, children’s rights in relation to the natural environment and climate change, as well as updated insights on children in conflict with the law.
Each chapter has been thoroughly updated reflecting current insights from relevant academic literature. Up-to-date until 15 February 2024, the second edition also covers updated discussions of recent case law. The Committee’s views on decisions adopted under OPIC have been included systematically throughout the different chapters, while the chapter on OPIC presents the Committee’s emerging procedural take on children’s communications and complaints. Children’s rights jurisprudence is further surveyed by analysing relevant case law from international courts, international bodies and regional human rights systems.
In line with the first edition, each chapter on a substantive article commences with an overall introductory summary of the article, moves on to interpret the substance of the article in terms of obligations and key issues incorporating the drafting history, interpretation of treaty bodies and case law as relevant. Where pertinent, the chapter then addresses contemporary legal debates as well as considerations beyond the law.
An excerpt from the introductory chapter (pages 29-31):
New topical children’s rights issues that are not explicitly addressed in the CRC have arisen over the more than three decades that have elapsed since the adoption of the CRC, including the rights of children in migration, of children in street situations, of adolescents, and of children in surrogacy and assisted reproduction situations. More recent new frontier issues include children’s rights in light of rapid digitalisation and as a part of the broader discussion on sustainability, including environmental sustainability and the climate crisis, the specific rights of LGBTQI+ children to gender identity, children’s economic and labour rights and their political rights, including the right to vote.
Children’s rights scholarship has also been impacted by and been in interaction with various movements in scholarship such as decolonisation scholarship, critical race theory and intersectionality scholarship.
Children and environment as an issue is gaining more importance in an era where the impacts of climate change are imminent, and action is urgent to halt its catastrophic fallout on the world and on communities. The vitality of the issue to children is well evidenced given the increasing involvement of children as activists in calling for drastic change or in becoming claimants in climate change litigation. One area within human rights law with respect to the environment where rapid legal developments are taking place is the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. ‘Children and the environment’ is a striking omission in the CRC, a reference in passing in art. 29 CRC notwithstanding. There is now undoubtedly an increasing awareness of the additional impact of environmental pollution in all its forms on children. Likewise, climate change and its long-term impacts disproportionately affect children. Nonetheless, for a long time, the take-up of sustainable development principles, including those linked to the environment, in children’s rights was slow and uneven, with the exception of some attention to intergenerational justice. The issue gained prominence very gradually until the early 2020s and has seen rapid development since. The former Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, John Knox, included in his 2018 report on children’s rights educational and procedural rights of children, as well as heightened obligations for States to pursue precautionary measures to protect children against environmental harm. After the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment was recognized as a human right first by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021 and by the UN General Assembly in 2022, the CRC Committee went on to adopt a specific General Comment on the issue: GC 26 on children’s rights and the environment with a special focus on climate change (2023).
New challenges to the implementation of the CRC have also arisen with technological advances such as the widespread use of information and communication technologies (ICT) giving rise to benefits for children as well as new risks of exploitation and abuse as well as new and successful methods of assisted reproduction or procedures such as gene editing. Children’s rights will need to continue reckoning with the broad reach of such technological advances and the rapid pace at which they occur.
Art. 45(c) CRC speaks to the need to deal with new problems or developments which are not covered by the Convention. This need to interpret the provisions of the CRC and its Protocols in light of recent developments is reflected in the various Days of General Discussion held on thematic issues as well as the GCs of the CRC Committee that have been issued over the last two decades. These thematic areas have included the impact of business on children’s rights, rights of adolescents, children in street situations, children in migration, digital media and children, children and the environment, children as human rights defenders and children’s rights and alternative care. The CRC Committee’s interpretation of the CRC and the work of regional human rights has by and large caught up with the developments in children’s rights although many of these issues remain blind spots in the CRC itself. Although many of the issues were not dealt with explicitly in the CRC’s provisions, the legal approach based on children’s rights has been formed by interpreting the CRC in a teleological fashion.
More information
In this video, the three co-authors explain why a second edition was needed and reveal their favourite CRC provision.