The protection of children's human rights in Europe. The jurisdiction of the European Court on corporal punishment and abuse of children in the United Kingdom

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The analysis undertaken in this dissertation gives attention to three core foci of examination. The first two are international legal documents used in the protection of human rights: The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) from 1989 and the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) from 1950. The third focal point consists of an investigation into a specific area of jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) regarding the protection of human rights of children: the phenomenon of the corporal punishment and abuse of children in the UK. This selection of verdicts of the European Court aims at portraying how the ECHR impacts on the child's human rights in practice and how well the work of the European Court reflects the values enshrined in the CRC and also gain an understanding of how the two conventional systems might impact on the other. The third chapter investigates verdicts of the Court that have dealt with cases that derive from institutional settings (judicial corporal punishment and punishment in public schools). The fourth chapter will observe private settings, where cases of corporally punished children relate to the private sphere (e.g. punishment through parents). Beside, it is intended to give a short outlook on two selected cases where a matter of more general abuse of children was under judicial scrutiny. The dissertation concludes that both the CRC and the ECHR are characterised by a number of more or less serious flaws and drawbacks in relation to the protection of children's human rights. The narrow textual scope of the ECHR and the significant weaknesses of the CRC regarding its implementation mechanism are two prominent examples. The paper suggests that in Europe, the trend of maximising the potential of the European Convention by combining the widely accepted, detailed standards on children's rights set out in the UN Convention with the highly successful and influential system of individual petition and implementation should find its continuation and be strengthened even further.