The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has made several rulings against the state of Norway during the last decades in the field of child welfare services. Several cases were brought to the court by parents who felt their right to maintain contact with their children had been violated in child welfare service care orders.
These cases were based on the right to family life, as stated in the Human Rights Convention, Article 8. Forced adoption has also been a central theme in the decisions. The rulings implied a necessary change of course for Norwegian child welfare services, regarding contact assessments between children and their parents. This is, among others, the case in the Strand-Lobben case. The ruling further implied that the norm of a certain number of meetings between children and parents must be set aside in favor of concrete and individual assessments in each case.
This project aims to provide an in-depth understanding of how social welfare workers deal with these contact issues, and to identify some tendencies in child welfare services practice regarding how they have applied necessary change, in line with the judgments from ECtHR.
Research questions
- What is ECtHRs´ fundamental argumentation in the rulings against Norway?
- How is contact between children and their parents, measured and justified by child welfare service workers in case orders?
- How are the consequences of the rulings handled by child welfare service leaders?
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