Children's rights : from Hammurabi’s codex to the convention on the rights of the child

Abstract

The purpose of this Article is to evaluate all the instruments that promoted in one way or another, children's rights. It is a diachronic research, which focuses on the international instruments that have struggled for the cause of the child. The first part deals with the old historical documents starting from the oldest instrument which is Hammurabi's Codex established in 1750 BC and followed by an overview of the Babylonian law. The next part discusses more recent human rights' instruments, which attempted to promote children's rights such as the Geneva Declaration on Human Rights in 1924. Then, emphasis is placed on the first international human rights document, which is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948. Following this period, in 1959, a Declaration of the Rights of the Child was agreed to focusing particularly on children, but the situation of the child then prompted the conclusion of an instrument with a legally binding status. That is why the article then focuses on the two international Covenants, namely, are the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women is then studied. The evaluation of the rights promoted in these documents demonstrates that these are not instruments specific to children's rights but to human rights in general. As a result, there is a need to evaluate the most famous Convention promoting exclusively children's rights that is the Convention on the Rights of the Child - CRC - approved in 1989. The last part examines the CRC and its two Optional Protocols, which are the Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography and the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. If all these human rights instruments are taken together into consideration, it is to be noticed that the perception of the child has changed throughout time. S/he is no more an object of rights in need of protection but a subject of rights who is the bearer of inalienable prerogatives of no less value than those of adults.