| Abstrakt: |
The silent majority i.e. the children were last to come into the category of rights-holders. The journey from being 'property of parents' to 'object of protection' and then from 'object of protection' to 'subject of rights' is very long. Declaration on the Rights of the Child 1924 under the umbrella of League of Nations was the first document whereby the children for the first time came into the international recognition. Then in 1959, under the umbrella of United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child was again adopted, where their protections and vulnerability was reinforced. These both documents were just dealing the protection measures regarding children and they were considered just "objects of protection". Then moment came in 1989, when the historic UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted, which first time recognised children as "rights-holders", and made them 'subjects of rights' from 'objects of protection'. The Convention proved to be the first significant binding instrument which explicitly recognised the children as possessors of rights and not the beggars. The examples and illustrations of three different jurisdictions i.e., United Kingdom: the kingpin of Common law, France; the leader of current civil law system and Pakistan; hybrid system, i.e., Common law mixed with Islamic Law, have been chosen. The objective of paper is to evaluate and see how children became the subject of international law and were lucky to be recognised as 'rights-holder' rather than only 'property' of their parents. The paper gives descriptive historical analysis the journey from 'child protections' to 'child rights' through two Declarations and a UN Convention, of children's rights, that led to their recognition as a category of holders of all human rights, along with special protection on account of their vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
