Children's rights: are the now taking them more seriously?

This article examines the extent to which the Human Rights Act 1998 has persuaded the courts to acknowledge that children have rights of their own. It argues that despite the European Convention on Human Rights being employed successfully to challenge infringements of children's rights in areas such as crime and education law, there appears to be little progress in other fields. In particular, the case law displays a disappointing reluctance on the part of the family judiciary to articulate disputes in terms of children's substantive rights. Instead they tend to bury any real discussion of children's interests, as opposed to those of their parents, under a wealth of rather vague assertions about their welfare. If the European Court of Human Rights was itself more prepared to treat children as individuals, rather than as adjuncts of their parents, things might be different. But as things stand, the Strasbourg case law provides the family courts with every excuse to continue responding to children's cases in an entirely ad hoc fashion, often without any real examination of the rights underlying the disputes before them.