ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a framework for re-reading court judgments from a children’s rights perspective. The features of a children’s rights judgment are distinguished through four stages of the judicial decision-making process: selecting and framing the issues for determination in a way that centralises the child; court procedures that enable children’s meaningful participation in proceedings; judicial reasoning that reconciles potentially competing rights and interests, using the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as a legal and normative framework; and communicating the court’s decision in the form of a judgment that shares the child’s own narrative and has children as a key audience. The common thread that binds these features is their contribution to enabling and listening to children’s voices in court proceedings, as a key manifestation of children’s ability to enjoy and exercise their decisional privacy rights.
