This is a text based seminar, where we discuss a draft version of the introductory chapter to Linde Lindkvist's forthcoming book The Making of Children’s Human Rights: An International History (Cambridge UP).

On November 20, 1989, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child without a vote. It was the first time in history that an international organization had agreed on a comprehensive legal framework for the human rights of children. The search for international agreement on children’s human rights had been long and uncertain. That uncertainty concerned not only the form such an agreement should take, but also the meaning of children’s rights themselves.

The focus of Linde Lindkvist's forthcoming book lies not principally with the present or future status of children’s rights, but on the long and uncertain path that led to the contemporary international framework through which these rights have come to be understood and governed.

Linde Lindkvist is senior analyst at the Swedish Institute for Human Rights and Docent in Human Rights. 

For a copy of the draft chapter, contact lena.halldenius@mrs.lu.se.