ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the enactment of refugee children's right to education established by the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopting a comparative European perspective. It deals with an examination of the literature related to policy-making and enactment from the sociology of human rights' perspective, in relation to refugee children's right to education. The chapter considers strengths and weaknesses of national and transnational systems of entitlement and protection, as well as the social processes. The normative incongruities between human rights and national sovereignty trigger the debate about whether the right to education, with particular reference to refugee children, is to be considered as universal or whether it is conditional on loyalty to the nation state. The focus on the United Kingdom and Italy is a response to the increasing need to examine discourses at international and national levels of policy-making and enactment in relation to the right to education of asylum-seeking and refugee children.
