AbstractMany of the refugees around the world today are children. Some of these children are travelling alone without anyone looking after them. These children flee from their countries to save their lives and as they are children they need special care and protection. This thesis has investigated the protection given to unaccompanied children during the asylum process in the two key instruments in the area: the Convention of the Rights of the Child and the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The Refugee Convention does not contain any procedural rights and does not specifically acknowledge children, even though they are included in the scope of the Convention. On the other hand, the Convention of the Rights of the Child includes some procedural rights, mainly the right of the child to be heard (article 12). But the convention provides no guidance when it comes to determining the refugee status for children.The purpose of this thesis is to look into the relationship between these two conventions and present current rights that occur when an unaccompanied child seeks asylum. The rights that are stated were thereafter derived from the different conventions so that the protection in them could be analyzed.In this thesis, it has been shown that the Convention of the Rights of the child contains important rights and protection for unaccompanied children during the asylum proceedings. The problem seems to be that the state parties do not comply with the rights in the convention. The conclusion of the thesis is that it is better to use the rights and protection that are already in place, meaning the Convention of the Rights of the Child, than creating an entirely new instrument. A lot of the problems that we have today may be solved with the third optional protocol of the Convention of the Rights of the child, since its purpose is to realize the rights that are stated in the convention.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-254250 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Kajliden, Emilie |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Juridiska institutionen |
| 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 |
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