By Asgeir Falch-Eriksen
Children’s rights are not self-enforcing. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989 and now ratified by virtually every state in the world, establishes a comprehensive legal and normative framework for protecting children from harm, ensuring their participation, and promoting their development. Yet the gap between legal commitment and actual practice remains wide in most countries. Translating international human rights norms into functioning child protection systems requires not only legislation, but also institutions, professional competence, democratic accountability, and a sustained political will to treat children as genuine rights-holders.
It is precisely this gap — between norm and reality, between legal text and lived experience — that OCRights now seeks to address through a new international course: Human Rights, Children’s Rights and Child Protection.
What the Course Is About
The course approaches child protection as a fundamentally normative and institutional challenge. It asks what cosmopolitanism requires of states, professions, and democratic institutions when children are at risk of harm, and how child rights can be operationalised in the face of cultural pluralism, political resistance, and limited resources. The framework is deliberately broad: students are invited to examine not only the legal dimensions of child rights, but also their moral foundations, their political implications, and the everyday dilemmas they generate for frontline professionals.
The course is structured around the CRC’s threefold duty to children: the duty to prevent harm, the duty to protect after harm has occurred, and the duty to rehabilitate and socially reintegrate children who have experienced serious violations of their rights. These three pillars — drawn directly from Articles 19 and 39 of the Convention — serve as the analytical backbone of the course and as the organising framework for students’ own comparative work.
Theoretically, the course draws on cosmopolitan political philosophy, liberal constitutionalism, discourse ethics, and institutional theory. It engages with foundational thinkers in these fields while maintaining a sustained focus on practical and empirical questions: How do child protection systems differ across countries? Where does legal norm-setting fall short in practice? How do street-level professionals navigate conflicting obligations? What makes a child protection system legitimate, trustworthy, and rights-sensitive? What happens when democratic majorities resist the protection of minority children, or when authoritarian tendencies erode the foundations of rights-based governance?
One of the distinguishing features of the course is that each student selects a country of their own choosing and uses that country’s child protection system as a sustained case study throughout. Through a series of guided tasks, students progressively build a portfolio that maps their chosen country’s legal architecture, governance structures, professional practices, and outcomes for children. This comparative dimension ensures that the course produces not only theoretical insight, but also the kind of country-specific knowledge that is directly relevant for work in child welfare services, NGOs, public administration, research, and international organisations.
Online and On-Campus: A Flexible Format
The course is offered in a combined format: a series of online lectures preceding an intensive on-campus week. The online component consists of four two-hour lectures that introduce the theoretical and normative foundations of the course — cosmopolitanism and the moral status of children, human dignity and constitutional rights, democratic legitimacy and the system of rights, and the governance architecture of child protection from international norm to street-level practice. The on-campus week deepens and extends this foundation through seminars on governance, system design, professional discretion, and the challenges of digitalisation and authoritarian backlash. Students present their portfolio work, receive detailed feedback, and engage with peers from different legal and welfare traditions — an exchange that is itself part of the learning.
Assessment rests on a written portfolio of eight pages and an oral examination, supplemented by short written tasks and active participation throughout the course. The portfolio format is deliberate: it requires students to accumulate and integrate knowledge progressively, rather than reproducing it at a single point in time. It also produces work that is directly applicable beyond the course itself.
Why This Course, and Why Now
The international context makes this course timely. Children’s rights face significant and growing political pressure in many parts of the world. Anti-gender movements have explicitly targeted children’s rights frameworks as sites of contestation. Authoritarian governments increasingly treat child protection as an instrument of social control rather than as a normative obligation towards children themselves. At the same time, the digitalisation of child welfare — predictive risk modelling, algorithmic decision support, cross-border data flows — raises new and urgent questions about due process, bias, and accountability that existing frameworks are not fully equipped to answer.
Against this backdrop, building rigorous, internationally comparative competence in children’s rights is not a luxury. It is a professional and civic necessity. Practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and advocates need analytical tools that allow them to identify where systems fall short, to argue for rights-based improvements with theoretical precision, and to situate their own national experience within a broader comparative and normative frame.
This is what the course is designed to provide.
An Offer to Universities and Institutions
OCRights is committed to offering this course as regularly as demand requires. The course was developed at ELTE University in Budapest and is taught by Asgeir Falch-Eriksen, Associate Professor at OsloMet and Assistant Director of OCRights, who has published extensively on human rights, child protection, professional practice, and welfare state theory.
OCRights extends a standing invitation to universities, research institutions, professional schools, and organisations interested in hosting or co-hosting the course. We are open to partnerships that adapt the course to different institutional contexts — whether as a module within an existing programme, as a standalone intensive course, or as a capacity-building offering for practitioners and professionals in child protection and related fields.
If your institution is interested in hosting the course, or if you would like more information about its content, format, and requirements, we warmly encourage you to reach out. Every context in which children’s rights are studied seriously is a context in which the protection of children becomes more possible.
Contact OCRights: ocright@oslomet.no
Or contact the course lecturer directly: Asgeir Falch-Eriksen — asgeirer@asgeirer