OCRights proceeds from a fact of positive law whose theoretical and practical consequences are far-reaching: children are holders of human rights. This is not the claim that children have interests which adults and public authorities may, at their discretion, elect to honour, nor one that depends on assent to any particular philosophical justification of human rights. Children’s rights have been formally constituted, through international conventions, regional human-rights instruments, national constitutions, legislation, and the judicial and administrative institutions that give them effect. In binding themselves through these arrangements, political communities have undertaken a standing obligation to respect, protect, and fulfil the rights of the child.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child gives this undertaking its most comprehensive and widely ratified legal form. Nation-states party to the Convention have recognised children as present holders of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, rights possessed throughout childhood, not held in abeyance until the child attains majority, acquires full legal capacity, or becomes able to assert them unaided.
In Norway this position is unusually robust. The Convention has the force of domestic law through the Human Rights Act and takes precedence when conflicting ordinary legislation; and central children’s rights have been raised to constitutional rank by Article 104 of the Constitution, which secures the child’s right to respect for human dignity, the right to be heard, the best interests of the child as a fundamental consideration, the protection of personal integrity, and the duty of the state to create conditions for the child’s development and material, social, and health security. Children’s rights in Norway are therefore neither distant international aspirations nor merely statutory entitlements: their core belongs to the constitutional order within which all public authority must be exercised, binding the legislature, the administration, municipalities, courts, and welfare institutions, and the professionals who act in the state’s name, and furnishing the standard against which public action, and public inaction, falls to be judged.
This positivity is decisive for the centre’s mission. Whatever disagreements persist about the moral foundations, conceptual coherence, or political desirability of human rights, the relevant communities have already committed themselves to govern by them. The question before us is therefore not whether children ought to have rights, that has received a formal legal answer, but what those rights require, how the corresponding public duties are to be interpreted and institutionalised, and whether public authorities in fact discharge the responsibilities they have assumed.
The gap between recognition and protection
Formal recognition does not, of itself, secure protection. Rights acquire practical reality only through institutions able to interpret, implement, and enforce them, and this exposes the structural tension at the heart of the centre’s research: children’s rights are universal in their claim yet particular in their realisation, dependent upon specific nation-states, municipalities, organisations, courts, and professional practices. A child holds the same rights irrespective of jurisdiction, but the protection actually afforded varies with geography, institutional capacity, political priority, professional competence, administrative classification, and social position.
OCRights studies this distance between the formal standing of the child as rights-holder and the protection the child receives. It examines how universal and constitutional commitments are translated into law, policy, organisational design, professional judgement, and the everyday encounters between children, families, and public institutions, asking where that translation succeeds, where it fails, and why rights that are formally binding may nonetheless remain inert.
Dignity, fiduciary authority, and the two faces of protection
The centre takes human dignity to be the normative ground of this legal order. The child is not a dependent object of care, an extension of parental authority, or an administrative case, but a person of equal moral and legal standing whose claims bind all who exercise power over them. Public authority over children is accordingly to be understood as a responsibility held in trust for the child, fiduciary rather than proprietary, and layered across family, municipality, court, and transnational institution, never as dominion.
This responsibility is at once protective and justificatory. Public institutions must prevent and respond to violence, neglect, exploitation, deprivation, discrimination, and other serious detriment, and whenever they intervene in the lives of children and families they must do so in ways that respect the child’s dignity, participation, family relations, personal integrity, and developing autonomy. OCRights therefore examines both failures to protect and harms produced through protection itself, both whether authorities act when children’s rights are imperilled, and whether the measures they adopt can be justified from the standpoint of the individual child.
Best interests and the discipline of approximation
Best interests names what the child would identify as her own interest if she were able to articulate it. An adult can be asked where his interest lies and can be held to the answer; the young child cannot, and the standard exists precisely to close that gap. To decide in a child’s best interests is therefore to act as proxy for a self-interest the child cannot yet formulate or pursue, not to substitute an adult’s preference for the child’s good, but to protect the conditions under which the child will one day articulate and act on interests of her own. So understood, best interests is oriented to future autonomy: it secures the developmental trajectory toward the capacity for self-determination that the child does not yet possess but is entitled to acquire. This is also how dignity is to be understood here. Dignity is not the bare fact of being cared for; it is inseparable from autonomy, from a person’s standing as the author of her own life. The child holds that dignity in full even though the capacity to exercise it lies in the future as an adult, and protecting best interests is the form that respect for the child’s dignity takes under conditions of dependency.
The best interests of the child occupies the centre of this inquiry. It gives the protection of dignity its child-specific legal expression while remaining, of necessity, indeterminate: under conditions of incomplete knowledge, conflicting perspectives, complex relationships, and uncertain futures, no institution can know with certainty what will be best for a particular child. This indeterminacy does not dilute the obligation; it intensifies the duty to construct procedures through which the child’s interests can be responsibly approximated. Such procedures must reconstruct the circumstances of the individual child, history, identity, attachments, vulnerabilities, material conditions, developmental needs, expressed views, and future possibilities — admit relevant knowledge, expose claims to testing, enable the child to participate, weigh less intrusive alternatives, and yield reasons that can be reviewed and contested. Throughout, the child must figure as the beneficiary of the procedure, not as the object of administration.
A cosmopolitan, institutionally mediated programme
The centre’s theoretical framework supplies the deeper architecture of its mission. Children’s rights are cosmopolitan in their claim yet institutionally mediated through nation-states. As human rights, the protection of dignity is the source of their normative force and set upon a public authority over the child as a fiduciary and layered above the fiduciary role of parents.
The protection at stake spans the full arc of harm: the prevention of dignity violations before they occur, the response to such violations once they are underway, and the recovery, rehabilitation, and social reintegration of children whose developmental trajectories have already been damaged by the harm they have suffered. OCRights accordingly sets itself three tasks: to clarify the responsibilities that follow from recognising children as formal, legal, and constitutional rights-holders; to examine whether public institutions in fact discharge them across this whole arc; and to develop the knowledge, professional practices, and organisational arrangements through which rights are translated into effective protection in the everyday lives of children.
The mission text is based on a forthcoming chapter in a book on child protection and law – coming in February 2027.