ChalabiAzadeh, National Human Rights Action Planning (Oxford University Press, 2018, 272pp, £70.00) ISBN 9780198822844 (hb)

This article seeks to provide a comparative and up-to-date overview of the applicable rules and relevant practice of the European Court of Human Rights and of the United Nations Human Rights Committee on forum duplication in international human rights litigation. While specific inadmissibility clauses have been included in both the European Convention on Human Rights and the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights with a view to preventing multiple human rights petitions in relation to the same matter, their respective scopes differ. Moreover, the applicable normative framework has led to important—and diverging—judicial developments in Strasbourg and in Geneva, which may be of great significance in human rights practice and therefore deserve to be thoroughly addressed.

While almost every state in the world has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, there is less consensus around the manner in which the rights protected by it should be protected in national constitutions. To say that a constitution makes provision for children’s rights is just a starting point: the extent to which a national constitution takes a genuine child rights approach will depend on the quality of the constitutional provisions in question. This article aims to provide a typology which can be used to assess whether the approach taken by any given constitution to the protection of children’s rights is in line with the child rights approach envisaged by the Convention by analysing individual constitutions along three separate spectrums. The Visibility spectrum measures how visible children are in a constitutional scheme; the Agency spectrum measures the extent to which children are considered to be independent, autonomous rights holders; and the Enforceability spectrum measures the extent to which children’s constitutional rights can be enforced.

world court of human rightsinternational courtsinternational bill of rightshuman rights treaties