Inter-American Children and their Rights: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Judicial Decisions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

Abstract

This article focuses on the influence of courts and the achr in the social construction of childhood and children’s rights. Using critical discourse analysis, it explores the meanings and understandings of childhood and children’s rights that emerge from the judgments of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on family care, custody, adoption, deprivation of liberty and detention conditions. From this analysis, I argue that the iachr constructs a normative notion of the child according to which she is understood as being between the categories of human being, human becoming, subject of rights and object of protection and a concept of children’s rights according to which these are primarily thought of as their right to receive special measures of protection. The tensions between this complex view on childhood and a paternalistic approach to children’s rights reveals the need for a children’s rights specific international human rights law instrument for the Inter-American human rights system.