Children’s Rights Protection in the EU: The Need for a Contextual Perspective

Despite the fact that global and European debates about children’s rights protection have evolved over time, children’s rights protection still remains one of the ‘soft’ issues more related to a promise than a reality. The research highlights the gap between political ambitions and local realities and forces to identify hindrances to children’s rights implementation. The variety of factors that influence norms implementation can be best captured by using a context-based approach to children’s rights protection. According to this approach, governance structures, legal and policy instruments are the elements that embody transformative potential. This means that they influence the decrease or increase of children’s vulnerability. In this article, I analyse the potential of the EU’s governance and policy framework which is one of the most favourable settings to protect children’s rights. By using the context-based perspective, the findings suggest that despite favourable legal conditions the EU’s policies remain fragmental and do not guarantee the UNCRC implementation as a whole document. However, the multilevel mode of governance, despite being a complicated setting for children s’ rights implementation, has a potential to produce significant results in children’s rights protection through the mainstreaming mechanism, which embodies a great power to create a unique integral context for ensuring children’s rights.