The overall research question is how to secure children’s rights in health matters and by this strengthen their rights in general. Hereunder a question is which impact core values and principles in health law, designed and developed for all humans, have for children. A central issue is to analyze the role of law and how various legal instruments can safeguard children’s right to health.

Another question is about participation and competence. Age and maturity have proved to be incomplete criteria for assessing children’s personal competence. The project seeks to identify other assessment criteria that can provide a more nuanced approach to children as right holders. Health care issues are of a rather personal character. The project will investigate which factors that should be decisive for children’s right to participate or decide in health matters. Conflict between the child and his/her parents or between the parents may lead to vulnerable situations for children.

The legal system itself may unintentionally cause vulnerability to children, in general, to specific groups of children or individuals in various situations. There is a need to investigate which legal mechanism that should be available in order to strengthen the child’s position and resilience. In order to make advancement in child law research it is necessary to develop better analytic tools. The project will develop a theoretical model on how to understand children’s rights in health law from a Nordic welfare state perspective. This model might later be of general value for research on other child-oriented legal domains.

The project bases the theoretical approach on central values and principles extracted from human rights theory, health law theory and child law theory. With these concepts as a backdrop, we have chosen to address how to secure children’s rights in health matters by building on a combination of three different theories: critical law studies, vulnerability theory and interest theory, all viewed from a child law perspective. The project seeks to create a model on how to understand children’s position as right holders, by taking a critical approach. Critical feminist theory is an inspiration for the critical approach. The vulnerability theory has its background in groups who are deprived rights on an equal foot as comparable groups. Vulnerability is defined as an inherent human condition, unlike autonomy. Only to a limited extent, child-law issues have influenced the development of vulnerability theory.  With a foundation for children’s rights in the concept of human dignity, we will also utilize the interest theory. Even if children lack the capacity to exercise their rights, they have an interest that society is bound to recognize.

The project is a normative project, within legal science, as the task is to analyze law and its fundaments building upon legal methodology. However, one of two reference groups is interdisciplinary. In developing a theoretical framework, the main task will be to study international literature and drawing heavily on our basic knowledge on human rights, health law and child law.