The Convention on the rights of the child (CRC) stipulates a set of rights for all children and declares that all national legislation should be in compliance with the convention. The CRC states that the best interests of the child shall be of primary consideration in all actions concerning children; that every child has the right to protection of their family relations as well as the right to know about its parents. The purpose of this study is to investigate how well does the Swedish regulation of establishing legal parenthood comply with the child’s family oriented rights stipulated by the CRC. The study uses a critical legal dogmatic method and is analysed from a theory of the best interests of the child principle. The result shows that the Swedish law strongly protects the child’s right to know about his/her genetic origin. However, the findings illustrate that the mentioned right is often seen as synonymous for what is best for the child, and therefore leaves no space for questioning other aspects that may affect the child’s well-being. Furthermore the results demonstrate that the Swedish family law mainly protects hetero normative families where none of the parents has changed their legal gender. The further away from this norm that the child’s family is, the more complicated it is to establish legal parenthood and therefor harder to protect the child’s right to its family relations. The paper argues that the Swedish family law hence leaves little space for what could be seen as the best interest of a specific child in a specific context, and by doing so diverges from the CRC which advocates contextually when analysing what is best for the child. The paper concludes that a more flexible law where the best interests of the child can be taken into account in greater extent could secure the rights of the child more effectively.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:ths-245 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Jeppson, Veronica |
| Publisher | Enskilda Högskolan Stockholm, Avdelningen för mänskliga rättigheter och demokrati |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
Page generated in 0.0567 seconds