Children's Participation Rights in the European Union: The Prospect of Meaningful Policy through Images of Children

Abstract

Children’s participation rights are among the most contentious rights enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) as they touch upon deeply rooted societal dynamics on whether children are and should be recognised as either social objects or subjects of rights. Parallelly, in the European Union (EU), the realisation of child participation hinges upon the European Commission’s limited mandate to achieve meaningful and binding child participation provisions. In this context, this thesis focuses on Member States as underestimated actors for the prospect of meaningful EU child participation policy and on how they recognise and perceive children. This thesis argues that establishing how children are perceived in three Presidencies of the Council of the EU (Romania, Germany and Finland) provides a narrow normative but necessary perspective on the prospect of meaningful EU child participation policy. More specifically, the three-dimensional concept of recognition by Axel Honneth (1995) and the figurative tool of images of children serve to establish a framework-matrix to assess child images in speeches and documents. This thesis finds that the challenge lies less in finding agreement across Member States than in realising meaningful child participation policy that understands children as subjects.