Great Expectations?

Rebecca Thorburn Stern

doi:10.1163/15718107-91010002

Abstract

Abstract In the Nordic countries children’s rights generally hold a particularly high normative status. All Nordic countries except for Denmark have incorporated the key human rights treaty on children, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (the crc), into the domestic legal order, giving the crc status as domestic law. Drawing on wider literature to define a key set of “expectations on incorporation”, the article analyses the extent to which incorporation of the crc in the domestic legal order of four out of five Nordic countries has had an impact on legal developments in the Nordics in the wake of the 2015 “refugee crisis”. It is suggested that in asylum law, where the risk of a conflict of interest between the individual and the State in many ways is obvious, there seems to be significant room for improvement when it comes to the actual impact of the crc.

Highlights

The large influx of asylum seekers and migrants in 2015/2016 put Nordic asylum systems under great strain and led to the introduction of migration laws and policies with a view to curbing the number of arrivals and strengthening migration control.[1]
This article examines recent legislative developments in the Nordic countries in the field of asylum law during and following the “refugee crisis” in relation to what could be expected in a country which has incorporated the crc into its domestic legal order
The analysis suggests that while children’s rights and the crc may hold a high normative status in the Nordics, there seems to be significant room for improvement when it comes the actual impact of the crc for the protection of the rights of asylum-seeking children in the region

Summary

Introduction

The large influx of asylum seekers and migrants in 2015/2016 put Nordic asylum systems under great strain and led to the introduction of migration laws and policies with a view to curbing the number of arrivals and strengthening migration control.[1]. Like asylum law where the risk of a conflict of interest between the individual and the State is in many ways obvious?13 Against this backdrop, this article examines recent legislative developments in the Nordic countries in the field of asylum law during and following the “refugee crisis” in relation to what could be expected in a country which has incorporated the crc into its domestic legal order. The intention is not to provide an exhaustive or in-depth empirical study, but rather to more generally analyse the effects of crc incorporation in a field such as asylum law To this end, the following section sets the scene by discussing the meaning of “incorporation” and based on the wider literature identifies a key set of expected outcomes of incorporation of human rights treaties in national legal systems. The analysis suggests that while children’s rights and the crc may hold a high normative status in the Nordics, there seems to be significant room for improvement when it comes the actual impact of the crc for the protection of the rights of asylum-seeking children in the region

What Do We Mean by Incorporation?

Conclusions