Search

The ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has long been hailed as a major event in the realisation of children's human rights, combining the need for protection with a desire to grant agency through recognition of the evolving capacities of the child. Yet the idea of children's agency as articulated in the CRC excluded sexual identity and expression, and ushered in an incomplete emancipation for LGBTIQ children; children who are gender non-conforming; and children whose sexual expression otherwise conflicts with heterosexuality – hereafter queer children. I argue that while the CRC granted children agency in terms of rights to expression, thought and conscience, it denied children sexual agency. Queer children's political agency is intimately connected to sexual identity and agency, because unlike their heterosexual counterparts, queer children's identity and expression is sexualised while, at the same time, they are excluded from adult, identity-based movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network theory is a valuable tool for understanding how transnational human rights advocacy emerges and develops; how norms become salient; and how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) gain prominence within networks. This article evaluates political network theory through the case study of the transnational lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) advocacy network. Through interviews with key figures at human rights and LGBTQ NGOs, I suggest that the transnational LGBTQ network emerged through contestation with the human rights gatekeeper, Amnesty International, and its US section, AIUSA. This process of contestation would produce a specific type of gatekeeper activism that would become a defining feature of the network. Over time, the network would evolve from a collection of national groups engaging in direct action to a highly professional and international network with a dual focus on movement building in the Global South and the advancement of LGBTQ rights at the United Nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International law on children’s rights, in important ways, usurps state authority over the ideology of childhood, establishing complicated and exacting standards that all states should adopt. The international community’s enshrinement of children as rights-holders and consolidation of power over the boundaries and standards of childhood mirrors international consolidation of authority over human rights in general after World War II, as the international community increasingly became the arbiter of acceptable treatment of citizens by states. In this paper, I argue that a globalized model of childhood that emerged after World War II was important to the development of the international system, serving to consolidate power and legitimize international institutions and order. I further examine the growth of this globalized model of childhood, one codified today in international law and developed primarily in Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and diffused from these points of origin throughout the world. The paper uses the development of domestic and international law forbidding the death penalty for child offenders as a point of entry into the study of childhood, children’s rights and the international system. It investigates the mechanisms of diffusion for the norm against the child death penalty and identifies three principal mechanisms of norm diffusion based on the findings of case studies and their types of law; colonial influence; temporal period of abolition; and participation in international legal regimes and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was widely considered to be a world leader in matters of child protection and welfare, a reputation lost by the century's end. This paper suggests that the United States' loss of international esteem concerning child welfare was directly related to its practice of executing juvenile offenders. The paper analyzes why the United States continued to carry out the juvenile death penalty after the establishment of juvenile courts and other protections for child criminals. Two factors allowed the United States to continue the juvenile death penalty after most states in the international system had ended the practice: the politics of American federalism and a system of racial subordination that excluded some juvenile offenders from the umbrella of child protection measures, a conclusion suggesting that racial prejudice has interfered with U.S. compliance with international norms of child welfare and juvenile justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the passage of a citizenship law that pass down rights to around 10,000 to 25,000 stateless individuals of the Roma community in 1993 in Czech Republic. The citizenship law provides guidelines to individuals who wanted to gain or maintain Czech citizenship. The requirements include verification of a five-year period of residence, unobjectionable criminal record and unwieldy fees and administrative processes. Key information regarding the factors that triggered the 1999 amendment with emphasis on the role of local nongovernmental organizations, human rights activists, international pressure and economic policy are also discussed.