ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a skeptical view of the Children’s Rights Convention, suggesting that in effect it demoted children from the status of equal persons – as they are under general human rights conventions – to possessions of parents, kin groups, ethnic and religious communities, and nations. Rather than endorse a special charter that treats its ostensible beneficiaries as objects of others’ rights, advocates for children should have launched a campaign to enforce children’s general human rights – in particular, under the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. This chapter uses international adoption to illustrate these points. In the US, ratification of the CRC could have reinforced legal rules and societal attitudes that are bad for children and forestalled progress in strengthening children’s constitutional rights, so on the whole US non-ratification might be positive from a child rights standpoint.
