The voice of the child and the implementation of the child's right to be heard in parental responsibility matters and cases

Abstract

The article deals with a very up-to-date issue, the ‘voice of the child’, i.e. the implementation of the child's right to be heard in parental responsibility matters and cases. My aim is to find an answer to the question of how the Hungarian codification, judiciary and academic legal literature have changed over the last decade and how they have adapted to the modern child-focused standards. The significance of the topic emerges from the fact that both the exercise and the rendering of parental responsibilities is somehow problematic in many families and this difficulty is burdened by the requirements of child-friendly justice. The issues dealt with in this paper concern the significance of the child's right to be heard, the necessity of the child's hearing, the connection between the child's protection and child's hearing, the difficulty of determination whether the child is capable of forming his or her own views, the direct and indirect hearing of the child and the difference between the child's hearing and the child's voice.