HJLS invites submissions for its thematic issue on ‘Challenges of children’s rights’, guest edited by Ágnes Lux (Centre for Social Sciences) and Refia Kaya (Hacettepe University).

Children’s rights and related social-legal issues are becoming a quite complex and far-reaching agenda for the international community. The most concerning issues arisen as the phenomena of child poverty, child labor, other forms of deprivation, global violence against children, the situation of children living with disabilities or with special needs in care, the burning problems of juvenile delinquency needs a multidisciplinary approach to evaluate at theoretical and practical level.

The area of the children’s rights (as it has only appeared in the 1920s as a subject of matter of modern socio-legal and political discourse) is quite young does not exist as a separate branch of law. Children’s rights do not affect only various fields of law, including civil law, criminal law, criminology, family law or administrative law, but also transcend the scope of constitutional law and international law. 

There is no single code of law for children’s rights. The main source is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted in 1989. The basic principle based on the human rights approach that has now become an unquestionable paradigm means that the child is entitled to all the rights as adults, since they are human beings. Indeed they are in need of particular protection and support as a result of their special socio-legal status and age, which has to be provided by their caretakers, and ultimately by the state, thereby children’s rights issues gaining understanding in a number of social and legal relations. Due to their vulnerability and their evolving capacities and as they are facing barriers to exercise of rights, children need more and more active state protection than usual. The area of children’s rights was able to gain for itself, through the motivation and intensive work of active social movements, that today an international convention ratified by virtually all states in the world recognizes the existence and protection of the rights of the child. 

But where do we stand now in the 21st century in the field of children’s rights?

We are welcoming papers from various fields within legal studies, such as family (civil) law, constitutional law, administrative law or criminal law and related disciplines (such as criminology, etc.), international law, and jurisprudence.

Papers may focus, among others, on the following topics:

• COVID-19 and children’s rights (incl. questions of discrimination in education vs. vaccination, mental health of the families, questions of digital competences - accessibility of digital tools in remote-education vs. poverty) 
• Limits of state / competences of families in parenting (incl. specialities of churches as maintainers of care institutions? - freedom of religion) 
• New forms of families (incl. transnational families, same-sex couples and children) 
• Constitutionalization of children's rights (children and children’s rights in constitutions) 
• Children in conflict with the law (incl. challenges of child-friendly justice, questions of legal representation, questions of low / high minimum age of criminal responsibility, unaccompanied minors and migrant families in alien procedures, restorative justice) 
• Situation of child participation (incl. right to assembly,  e.g. Fridays For Future (FFF) demonstrations, children involved in decision-making processes) 
• Violence against children (incl. online safety, child prostitution - trafficking, new forms of substance abuse, disciplines in parenting) 
• Implementation of children’s rights in cases of emergencies (incl. war situations)  
• Children’s rights and climate change (incl. sustainable consumption, education, climate disasters) 
• Questions related of development in biomedicine (incl. new issues related to human reproduction e.g. embryo donation, surrogacy, home birth, embryo research) 
• Defending children’s rights in international level (monitoring mechanisms, eg. UN reporting processes, Universal Periodic Review (UPR), efficacy of  the UN) 

Hungarian Journal of Legal Studies – Acta Juridica Hungarica (HJLS) is an international double blind peer-reviewed journal of the Centre for Social Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, founded in 1959 by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, one of the most prestigious legal journals of Hungary. The main aim of the Journal is to provide a forum for all topics relevant to Central European legal systems.

HJLS is published by Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest. For more information and for earlier issues please follow this link. HJLS is published by AKJournals, Member of the Wolters Kluwer Group.

The editors invite unpublished research papers for publication in its forthcoming issue. Articles should be no more than 8,000 words. The language should be British English, referencing style a slightly modified version of OSCOLA. For further details on referencing see the last pages of the “Instruction for Authors” here.

Deadline of submission: 30th September 2022.

Submissions, including a short CV, should be submitted via the HJLS’s free online submission system. You may find further information on the submission process under “Instruction for Authors” here. Should you have any difficulty, please contact the Editors, Miklós Könczöl (konczol.miklos@tk.hu) and Viktor Lőrincz (lorincz.viktor@tk.hu).

Guest editors of the issue are Agnes Lux (research fellow, Centre for Social Sciences) and Refia Kaya (assistant professor, Hacettepe University), if you have a direct question, comment, please contact: lux.agnes@tk.hu .