Aoife Daly (University of Liverpool) has posted A Proposal: Replace the ‘Right to Be Heard’ with a ‘Children's Autonomy Principle’ (Aoife Daly, Children, Autonomy and the Courts: Beyond the Right to be Heard (Brill/Nijhoff, 2018)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This is Chapter 1 of Children, Autonomy and the Courts: Beyond the Rights to be Heard (Daly, 2018). This chapter proposes that, although CRC Article 12 focuses on ‘hearing’ children in proceedings about their best interests, instead the aim should be to facilitate children to exercise autonomy to the highest degree possible, through a children’s autonomy principle. In legal decisions in which the best interest of the child is the primary consideration, children should get to choose – if they wish – how they are involved (process autonomy) and the outcome (outcome autonomy) unless it is likely that significant harm would arise from their involvement or preferences. The examination in this chapter of the textual problems with CRC Article 12 will inform arguments later in the book around the moral and legal inconsistencies surrounding the treatment of children’s autonomy in practice.