INTRODUCTION

More than 30 years have passed since the signing of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). It has served as a basis for numerous demands and initiatives, among which several have to do with Children’s access to justice in cases concerning them.

The purpose of this contribution is to question the risks of seeing Children’s access to justice turn against them in order to better understand how to avoid these risks.

The subject is vast and the question difficult. The following thoughts are necessarily fragmentary, in light of the space allotted to this contribution. They draw their inspiration principally from observation of the Belgian legal system, and to a lesser extent, of some other Western systems. They are built on both my practice as a lawyer and my research. The present contribution is by no means the last word on the topic. Its sole purpose is to contribute to the debate and analysis.

CHILDREN AT THE HEART OF A DIALECTICAL TENSION

The child is both similar and different from the adult. They are similar because they are a thinking and speaking human being. However, they are different because of their physical and mental characteristics, their lack of experience, their relationship to the world, the use of codes specific to them, etc. These factual differences change over the life of the child. In the first years of life, children find themselves in a position of weakness due to their dependence on adults, who need to cover many of their needs. Subsequently, the diff erence embodied in older teenagers may take on ‘a negative image, one that is a little monstrous: too old to be cajoled, too young to be treated as an adult, they embarrass, provoke and frighten’. Rousseau already stressed that childhood was the condition of humanity: we cannot be adults without having been children. Childhood thus does not take the form of a succession of thresholds to be crossed in order to attain the perfect stage, that of adulthood.