13. The Protection of Children's Rights: At the Heart of Social Justice and Human Dignity - Prof. K. Hanson & Dr. R. Ruggiero

In this episode, we delved into issues surrounding children as social actors and subjects of rights. As a discipline, children’s rights studies seek to investigate the content, origins and consequences of global, national and local norms, as well as practices and discourses in the field of children’s rights, with a particular focus on children’s agency. The Centre of Children’s Rights Studies plays a key role in advancing knowledge in this important field. We talked about the Centre’s strategy in terms of continuing education & training but this discussion was above all a good opportunity to get insights from our experts about where we currently stand as a society regarding children’s rights and what the research shows in terms of trends and metrics. Although it does not receive as much coverage as it should, the protection of children’s rights is undoubtedly one of our most important global causes. It sits at the heart of social justice and human dignity.

Karl Hanson is the Director of the Centre for Children's Rights Studies at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and Full Professor in Public Law at the University of Geneva’s Law Faculty. He obtained his doctorate in Law in 2004 from Ghent University, Belgium, where he worked as a Researcher at the Children’s Rights Centre and as a Senior Researcher at the Human Rights Centre. His publications and main research interests are in the field of interdisciplinary children’s rights studies and include theorizations on children’s rights and childhood studies, working children and child labour norms and policies, international children’s rights law and juvenile justice. He teaches at the University of Geneva in the Master interdisciplinaire en droits de l’enfant (MIDE). He is also the Programme Director of the Master of Advanced Studies in Children's Rights (MCR) and Chair of the Steering Committee of the Children’s Rights European Academic Network (CREAN). Karl Hanson is co-editor of the journal Childhood (Sage).

Roberta Ruggiero is the Director of the Children's Rights Academy, which is the Continuing Education Unit of the Centre for Children Rights’ Studies. Shed holds an MA in Law, an MA in Human Rights and Democratisation (E.MA) and a PhD in Promotion and Protection of Children’s Rights. She is Senior Research and Teaching Associate at the University of Geneva’s Centre for Children's Rights Studies (CCRS – UNIGE), where she coordinates and teaches in several training programmes, namely the Master of Advanced Studies in Children's Rights, the Summer School ‘Children at the Heart of Human Rights’ and the MOOC ‘Interdisciplinary Introduction to Children’s Rights’. She is the former scientific coordinator of the European Network of National Observatories on Childhood (ChildONEurope), Istituto degli Innocenti (2008-2013), senior lecturer at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Padua, Italy and external professor on children’s rights at the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, University of Molise, Italy. Prior to these positions, she worked as researcher at the IOM Europe Office and at UNICEF-Innocenti Research Centre. Her research interests and publications include children’s rights in the EU framework of law and policy, independent national human rights institutions for children, implementation of children’s rights and comparative childhood governmental policies.

References: D. Archard, Children: Rights and Childhood (1993); J. Heckman, "Invest in early childhood development: Reduce deficits, strengthen the economy" (2012); Pink Floyd, "Another Brick in the Wall" (Song); I. McEwan, The Children Act (2014).