Justifying Children’s Rights

Abstract

The conceptual foundations of children’s rights remain under theorized. This paper develops a social interest theory of rights to offer a justification for the conception of rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It reveals that this conception is capable of producing a culturally sensitive, dynamic, inclusive and relational conception of rights that remedies many of the deficiencies associated with the traditional conception of human rights as being Western, individualistic trumps.