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15 Int'l J. Child. Rts. 5 (2007)
Why It Remains Important to Take Children's Rights Seriously

handle is hein.journals/intjchrb15 and id is 11 raw text is: Tsr I~mrno u Joniw Or MARTINUS NIHOFF PFUBi L I S HE R S International Journal of Childrens Rights 15 (2007) 5-23 ww.brill.nl/chil Why It Remains Important to Take Children's Rights Seriously Michael Freeman University College London It was Ronald Dworkin who, nearly 30 years ago, urged us to 'take rights seriously' (1977). It is a pity that his argument did not specifically extend to children. Indeed, that in a little noticed passage a decade later he stumbled on the dilemma of what 'Hercules' (the ideal superhuman judge) should do when he thought 'the best interpretation of the equal protection clause outlaws distinctions between the rights of adults and those of children that have never been questioned in the com- munity, and yet he ... thinks that it would be politically unfair..., for the law to impose that view on a community where family and social practices accept such distinctions as proper and fundamental' (Dworkin, 1986, 402). Nor has he ever returned to this dilemma; a pity because it beautifully encapsulates the problem of what to do when the supposedly 'right answer' is morally the 'wrong answer'. When Taking Rights Seriously was published we were in the heyday of the chil- dren's liberation movement. This was the era of Farson (1978) and Holt (1975). Their thesis is ripe for reassessment, but it is clear that at the time its impact was limited. Dworkin was clearly unaware of it, as indeed he was of other children's rights literature of the 1970s and earlier.' My own first foray into writing on children's rights was in 1980, the text of a lec- ture given to celebrate the International Year of The Child in 1979 (1980). The Rights and Wrongs of Children (1983) emerged four years later. Then followed the Brian Jackson Memorial Lecture in Huddersfield in 1987 (1988) which advocated that we take children's rights seriously, and a paper at a workshop on 'children, rights and the law' at the ANU in 1991 which emphasised the need to take chil- dren's rights' more seriously' (1992). By then, of course, there was the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was swiftly ratified by vir- tually the whole world2, and there were developments in legal systems which sug- gested that children's rights were indeed being taken seriously or at least a lot more seriously than previously.3 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/092755607X181711