The Rights of Refugee Children and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

Abstract

Refugee children are identified as rights-bearers by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), but their rights are not uniformly honored in the policies and practices of contemporary states. How the CRC’s safeguards for refugee children’s rights are honored depends partly on what it means to be ‘a refugee child’ and partly on how the claims of refugee children’s rights are recognized, respected, and implemented in international and national legal and bureaucratic systems. We examine the CRC’s affirmation of the rights of the child and analyze the CRC’s articles in relation to the rights related to the life circumstances of refugee children and state responsibilities. Following an analysis of resistance to the CRC’s mandates by contemporary states, we relate refugee children’s rights to their refugee and developmental experiences and argue for repositioning refugee children into the center of protection dialogue and practice, internationally and nationally.

Keywords

• refugee children
• children’s rights
• children’s agency
• UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
• developmental trajectories
• refugee trajectories