Implementing Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: Participation, Power and Attitudes

In Participation, Power and Attitudes: Implementing Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Rebecca Thorburn Stern analyses how CRC state parties describe their implementation of Article 12 on respect for the child’s views. The focus of the study is on if, and how, references to traditional attitudes are used by state parties to explain their actions and inactions when implementing this key right and principle. It is shown that ‘traditional attitudes’ are employed less as justification of poor implementation than as a way of allocating responsibility to the population rather than to the state party, and that references to tradition remain a mainly non-Western phenomenon, thus also overlooking the impact of traditional attitudes in Western societies.