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Document Details : Title: Children's Rights to Asylum and the Capability Approach Author(s): JOSEFSSON, Jonathan Journal: Ethical Perspectives Volume: 23 Issue: 1 Date: 2016 Pages: 101-130 DOI: 10.2143/EP.23.1.3141836 Abstract : The prospect of large populations of children migrating across national borders raises urgent political and ethical questions about children’s rights to asylum. In recent years, there has been an increase in scholarly interest in migrating children and children’s rights, but this interest has thus far been scant in political theory. The present article uses the Capability Approach to discuss children’s rights to asylum and to examine the prospects and limitations of the approach in this context. It underlines that, despite a global consensus on the rights of the child, the political and ethical challenges to children’s rights to asylum cannot be reduced to a question of the implementation of universal rights or capabilities of children – a matter of technicalities or mainstreaming of legislation. Instead, the question of children’s rights to asylum is a highly political and ethical matter, characterized by ambivalent conceptualizations of children and conflicting interests that continue to pose a considerable challenge to the organisation of the international political and legal system. The Capability Approach has the potential to fill a theoretical gap with regard to children’s interests and the setting of threshold levels, although it continues to wrestle with questions of how to confront the asylum-seeking child as a political subject within well-functioning democracies and how to determine a specific list of capabilities and corresponding duties in deliberation between the right to self-determination of nation states and universal entitlements of children. |
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