Great Expectations?

Abstract

In the Nordic countries children’s rights generally hold a particularly high normative status. All Nordic countries except for Denmark have incorporated the key human rights treaty on children, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (the crc), into the domestic legal order, giving the crc status as domestic law. Drawing on wider literature to define a key set of “expectations on incorporation”, the article analyses the extent to which incorporation of the crc in the domestic legal order of four out of five Nordic countries has had an impact on legal developments in the Nordics in the wake of the 2015 “refugee crisis”. It is suggested that in asylum law, where the risk of a conflict of interest between the individual and the State in many ways is obvious, there seems to be significant room for improvement when it comes to the actual impact of the crc.