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Description
The proposed project will examine empirically to what extent the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is considered to be relevant in democratic assemblies and legal regulations, if it corresponds to the nature of trust people have in child protection services, and if it can be traced through professional practices. The project aims to develop a comprehensive expression and conceptualization of the protection of the child according to the CRC, and will focus upon the right of non-discrimination, best interests of the child, participation and family-life. These four rights will be used as a lever to answer the two following questions: (1) What does the individual child’s cosmopolitan citizenship entail according to the corerights? and (2) What does successful protection of children entail, provided the child’s cosmopolitan citizenship? Each work package will do research upon most of the other research-areas of the call as well. Thus, one of the main goals is to assess the effects of child protection crises on participative democracy. Moreover, migration is a test-case for cosmopolitan child citizenship, and will be answered across all work packages. The same goes for how minorities, such as Roma and Sami, become treated by child protection services.
Summary of project results
The CONSENT project examined empirically to what extent the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is considered to be relevant in democratic assemblies and legal regulations, if it corresponds to the nature of trust people have in child protection services, and if it can be traced through professional practices. Within the EU and EEA, member states are obliged to comply with the CRC, as all have ratified it, and must also adhere to the EU Charter and the European Convention on Human Rights. While each state can implement conventions at their discretion, international human rights must maintain a consistent standard to uphold the cosmopolitan ethos of these conventions. Effective enforcement of these rights relies on political effort within each state. When rights must be enforced beyond a state''s democratic capacity or willingness, they take on a constitutional role, distinguishing cosmopolitan rights from traditional democratically developed rights. This is where cosmopolitan rights-based citizenship comes into play, ensuring rights are upheld even beyond democratic consensus.
The project developed a comprehensive expression and conceptualization of the protection of the child according to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and focused upon the right of non-discrimination, best interests of the child, participation and family-life. CONSENT’s outputs benefit CPS practitioners and leaders, policy makers and experts and relevant stakeholders from Romania and Norway. In addition, the project contributed to raising awareness on child protection systems problems among the general public. Additionally to the results that were proposed in the project proposal, during the Covid-19 pandemic the research team conducted a survey on the challenges children faced during the pandemic - Children during the pandemic, focusing on capturing what was happening with the application of children’s basic rights in Romania during the pandemic, namely the right to non-discrimination, the child’s best interest and the right to participation.
The CONSENT project has finalized several data collection tasks that lead to multiple conference papers, chapters in peer reviewed books and articles published in academic journals. The dissemination of the project results are used by the policy makers, practitioners and the academic community. The main background motivation to CONSENT is to establish ground-breaking research that will help to inform both the academic and public discourse on child protection, and attempt to challenge and help solve a societal challenge caused by member states having child protection services that other member-states disagree with.
Summary of bilateral results
The three institutions involved in the project have written and submitted applications for several funding programs, as to ensure the continuity of the topic studies in CONSENT and the cooperation between Babes-Bolyai university, Oslo Metropolitan University and Bergen University.