The crisis and public policies on children
Back in December 2013 I signed this article together with my friends and colleagues from Argituz, Eva Silván and Josu Oskoz. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child had published its General Observation. This document clearly established that the superior interest of children had to be the main consideration in all public policies on children. We thought that such an important ruling did not deserve to go unnoticed in the media, and this is why we wrote the article.
This is part of the article:
“The Committee underlines that the superior interest of the child is a triple concept. First and foremost, it constitutes a substantive right: it is the child’s right that his or her superior interest is the main consideration that is to be evaluated and taken into account when considering various interests, and there is to be a guarantee that such a right is to be put into practice whenever a decision that affects children is to be taken. This establishes the inherent obligation of direct application of such a right for States. This right may also now be invoked before the courts of law.
Secondly, we now have a fundamental juridical interpretation principle, and therefore, if a juridical norm allows for more than one interpretation, the one that most effectively satisfies the superior interest of the child is to be applied. This constitutes a norm of procedure, so that whenever a decision that affects children has to be taken, the decision-making process is to include an estimation of possible repercussions such a decision would have on the concrete child affected by such a decision”.
It is my intention to translate -in full- all the articles I have written or contributed to writing into English, and I shall be doing so in due course. In the meantime, you can read the original Spanish version in the link below.
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