International Children’s Rights Law and Child Labour

This chapter examines the emergence of children’s rights at the international level and the child labour issue. It traces the emergence of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and its significance. A key argument developed in this chapter is how the Convention globalizes a Northern ideology of childhood that never captures the diversity of what it is to be a child and children’s everyday lives across the globe. It is argued that the Convention has been used to reproduce particular hierarchies and structures of power between the North and South, because the blueprint that it sets for childhood, a Northern template, is rarely achievable by states in the South thus leaving them open to ‘moral condemnation’. The chapter then examines the complexities of child labour and the role of International Labour Organization (ILO) in addressing the problem.