Children as the Subject of Rights
Children as Rights Holders
With the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1989 (entry in to force in 1990), Children were recognized as the Subject of Rights.
This is a recent conceptualisation of children (among other conceptualizations) in the contemporary Human Rights discourse, described by UNICEF as "Children are neither the property of their parents nor are they helpless objects of charity. They are human beings and are the subject of their own rights."
References: UNICEF: Child Rights and why they Matter
History
The first so-called recognition of children's Rights was the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child by the League of Nations in 1924, but this was as the Object, not the Subject, of Rights. Janus Korzcak, possibly the earliest defender of Child Rights and certainly one of the founders of the modern children's rights movement, was rightly critical of the Geneva Declaration, as it listed the duty of adults rather than the rights of the child. His ideas posthumously inspired the Polish delegation to the United Nations (UN) in 1979, the International Year of the Child, to call for an international treaty safeguarding children’s rights, which spurred the process by which the General Assembly adopted the UNCRC ten years later (Feldman).
References:
- UN acknowledgement of Korczak's legacy at the 25th Anniversary of the CRC
- Daniel Feldman, Honoring the Child’s Right to Respect: Janusz Korczak as Holocaust Educator
- Timeline of the History of Child Rights
Implicit Exclusion
Reading the early documents of contemporary Human Rights (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966)), it is not evident that children are not the Subject of Rights - in fact, Article 1 of the UDHR begins "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." which would imply that rights accrue at birth. They arguably could be read that all people of all ages have all the rights, and children have additional rights (Eg. Articles 23 & 24 of the ICCPR) - but the reality was that children were only granted the rights (as objects) where explicitly mentioned - they were denied other rights by Implicit Exclusion.