The human Rights of Children: Citizenship beyond the “3Ps”

Abstract

International recognition of children and adolescents as subjects who deserve rights has occurred in leaps and bounds, with long intermediate periods, in which the debate about the applicability of human rights to human beings in their early stages of life has taken place. This debate reveals a tension between the will of progress of the autonomy of children, on one hand, and the restraint and control of their capacities of action, on the other. All this has had the best of intentions for the purpose of facilitating progress in order to guarantee the rights of the world’s children and adolescents. But, once again, it has not paid much attention to their own understanding of what are their rights, of what means to feel like a citizen, in an adult world which is blind and deaf vis-à-vis the children’s effective exercise of rights and citizenship. In this article we will first review the state of affairs of the debate regarding children's rights and citizenship. It aims to reach the core, that is, the main objective of our argument: to put forward that, if we really want to advance the practical implementation of universal human rights, it is necessary to "deconstruct" the narrative created to explain children’s rights, in order to "reconstruct" it subsequently in its original essence and to "recreate" it by means of policies and social practices.