The International Journal of Children s Rights

About The International Journal of Children s Rights

The International Journal of Children's Rights — Journal Profile

The International Journal of Children's Rights is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Brill in Leiden, the Netherlands, and devoted to the rights of children as a field of law, policy and social research. The Journals World record for this post gives the print ISSN 0927-5568 and the online ISSN 1571-8182, and those identifiers are confirmed everywhere the journal itself appears: its articles carry DOIs under Brill's prefix 10.1163 built on the online ISSN — for example 10.1163/15718182-32010007 for a 2024 article in volume 32 — and its publisher address is Brill's Leiden office. The journal was established in 1993, at the moment when the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989 and in force from 1990, was turning children's rights from a declaration of intent into a working legal system that states had to implement and scholars had to interpret. Its founder was the Dutch psychologist and children's rights scholar Philip E. Veerman, who initiated the journal in 1993; three decades later the journal remains the specialist periodical of record for the field it helped to define. It publishes four issues a year, and its volumes are numbered from 1993, so that volume 32 corresponds to 2024 and volume 33 to 2025 — a simple check that helps a reader date any citation from this journal at a glance.

The apostrophe matters for searching: the title is catalogued in several forms — with a typographic apostrophe, with a plain apostrophe, and, as in this Journals World post, without one at all, as “Children s Rights”. Those are spelling variants of one title, not different journals, and the ISSN pair is the way to prove it. A second Journals World record exists under the title International Journal of Children's Rights, with the identical ISSN pair; it is a thin duplicate candidate for the site's merge process, and this post is the record profiled here. Within the journal's own pages, the short publisher address brill.com/chil has been printed on its articles for years, identifying the title within Brill's journal programme.

At a glance

• Title: The International Journal of Children's Rights
• Publisher: Brill, Leiden, Netherlands
• Print ISSN: 0927-5568
• Online ISSN: 1571-8182
• Established: 1993; founder Philip E. Veerman
• Frequency: Four issues a year
• DOI pattern: 10.1163/15718182, followed by volume, issue and article number
• Field: Children's rights law, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, child participation, child protection, juvenile justice and childhood studies
• Journals World snapshot: H-index 64 in the record for this post — a dated indexing figure, not a permanent rank

Why this journal exists

Before 1989, children appeared in international law mostly as objects of protection — persons to be fed, sheltered and kept from harm. The Convention on the Rights of the Child changed the legal picture: the child became a holder of rights, including participatory rights — to be heard in matters affecting them, to express views, to freedom of thought and association — alongside the protective and provision rights to life, health, education and an adequate standard of living. That change created scholarly problems that general human rights journals could not absorb on their own. What does the best-interests principle actually require a court to do when it conflicts with a child's own expressed wishes? How should a state weigh evolving capacities as a child matures? What does incorporation of the Convention into national law change in practice, and what remains symbolic? A specialist journal was needed in which lawyers, social scientists, psychologists and practitioners could argue those questions with shared texts and shared vocabulary. The International Journal of Children's Rights was founded to be that forum, and its archive is now one of the longest continuous records of how the Convention has been interpreted, implemented, criticised and extended — including through its Optional Protocols and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, whose committee's work the journal has documented in depth, for example in a 2017 interview with the chairpersons of the African and United Nations children's rights committees published for the journal's twenty-fifth volume.

Scope in detail

The Convention and its implementation

The journal's centre of gravity is the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: its articles, its interpretation by the Committee on the Rights of the Child, and its translation into national law and policy. Articles examine incorporation of the Convention into domestic legal systems, comparing how different states give the treaty effect and what difference incorporation makes to litigation and administration. Others take a single article — the right to be heard, the best-interests principle, the responsibilities of parents to provide direction consistent with the child's evolving capacities — and trace how it is understood across jurisdictions. This is slow, careful legal scholarship, and it is cumulative: a reader following one provision across several volumes can watch an interpretation being built, challenged and refined by successive authors.

Participation, agency and the child's voice

If one theme defines the journal's second generation, it is participation. A large body of work asks what it means, concretely, for children to take part in decisions: in family proceedings, in care and protection systems, in schools, in research itself. Studies report what children and parents themselves think about the right to participation; analyses expose the gap between participatory structures on paper and children's experience of being unheard in practice; theoretical work reconciles — or refuses to reconcile — the tension between best interests, which adults assess, and the right to be heard, which the child exercises. An article in volume 32, for instance, builds a global typology of child participation in order to compare how different systems institutionalise it. For practitioners, this strand is the journal's most immediately usable: it converts an abstract right into checklists of institutional failure and success.

Protection, welfare and the state

Protection remains a core concern: child protection services and decision-making within them, children in out-of-home care, adoption and family law, poverty and child welfare, and children in situations of armed conflict, where the journal has published on the monitoring of grave violations against children and on the education rights of children caught in conflict. Work in this strand is often empirical and country-specific — assessing, for example, how a national integrated-protection law changed practice in one province — and the journal's international authorship makes its volumes a comparative resource: the same protective problem can be read across legal families and income levels, with the cultural and contextual differences made explicit rather than assumed away.

Health, identity, justice and emerging questions

The journal's range extends to children's right to health and how it is realised, to identity — including hard questions at the boundary of biomedical decision-making, such as prenatal genetic selection considered from a child-centred approach — to juvenile justice, to education, and to the translation of the Convention into professional practice across different national policy contexts. Its method is deliberately interdisciplinary: the record for this post lists children's rights and participation, legal and social justice studies, international law and human rights, family and matrimonial law, child welfare and adoption, poverty and education, and ethics among its subject areas, and that breadth is real. A single issue may place a doctrinal analysis of a Convention article beside an empirical study of children's own views and a policy evaluation, because the field's questions cannot be answered from within one discipline.

Who writes, who reads, and how to use the journal

Authors are children's rights lawyers, childhood studies scholars, social work and social policy researchers, psychologists and practitioners from governmental and non-governmental bodies, writing from every region — the journal's pages include work on African, European, Latin American, Asian and Middle Eastern systems as well as comparative and theoretical pieces. Readers include academics building a literature review on any Convention question, judges and lawyers looking for comparative interpretation, policy staff drafting child law or auditing a protection system against the Convention, and graduate students entering the field, for whom the journal's back volumes function as a syllabus of the field's debates. The reference record for this post reported some nineteen thousand citations to the journal's indexed works, which reflects that centrality: on many children's rights questions, a search that skips this journal is incomplete.

To use it well, search by concept and by Convention article together — “best interests”, “Article 12”, “participation”, “incorporation” — because the field's vocabulary is anchored to the treaty text. Read the abstract for jurisdiction before generalising: a finding about participation in one country's care system is evidence about that system first and about children everywhere only second. Check the volume year against the legal position described, because child law changes quickly and a 2009 analysis may predate a reform it helped to cause. And cite by DOI: Brill's DOIs encode the online ISSN and the volume and issue, so a DOI citation can be verified in one step even when the title's apostrophe has been mangled by a database — as it has been in the very title of this post.

Editorial character and standards

The journal is a conventional peer-reviewed scholarly periodical from a long-established academic publisher, and its articles follow the apparatus that implies: abstracts, keywords, structured legal and scholarly citation, and copyright held and administered through Brill, with some articles published open access under Creative Commons terms — a 2020 article on incorporation, for example, appeared under a CC BY licence — while access to other content runs through Brill's platform and subscribing libraries. The editor-in-chief named in reference works for the journal in recent years is Laura Lundy, a scholar of children's participation rights; editorship details, submission instructions, and any charges are matters to confirm on Brill's current journal pages, because they change over a journal's life and no figure for them is asserted here without a current official source. What does not change is the standard a submission must meet: a defined children's rights question, command of the Convention framework and the existing literature in this journal and beyond, a method appropriate to the claim — doctrinal, comparative, empirical or theoretical — and conclusions that distinguish what the evidence shows from what the author believes the law ought to become. Manuscripts that treat children only as passive objects of adult decision-making, without engaging the participatory turn that defines the modern field, are unlikely to fit the journal's programme, however competent they are as general welfare writing.

Verification and common confusions

Three confusions recur with this title. First, the apostrophe: databases render it as Children's, Children’s or Children s; all are the same journal, proven by ISSN 0927-5568 and 1571-8182. Second, the near neighbours: Brill also publishes a book series commentary on the Convention, article by article, and other publishers issue journals on child law, childhood and youth with similar names; the commentary series is a book series, not this journal, and the ISSN separates them. Third, metrics: the h-index of 64 in the Journals World record is a snapshot from one indexing pipeline at one date, useful as a sign of a heavily cited journal and useless as a precise current measure; anyone needing a current metric should take it from the indexing service itself, dated. For verification, the order that works is ISSN, then DOI, then Brill's platform, then directories — the same order that resolves every confusion above.

Frequently asked questions

When was the journal founded, and by whom? In 1993, initiated by Philip E. Veerman, shortly after the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child entered into force; Brill has published it from Leiden throughout.

What are its ISSNs? Print 0927-5568 and online 1571-8182. Its DOIs begin 10.1163/15718182.

Is it only for lawyers? No. It is interdisciplinary — law is its anchor, but sociology, psychology, education, social work and policy research appear throughout, united by the children's rights framework rather than by a single method.

How often does it appear? Four issues a year, gathered into an annual volume numbered from 1993.

Is there another Journals World post for it? Yes — a second, thin record under the title International Journal of Children's Rights carries the same ISSN pair and a short template text. It is flagged as a duplicate candidate; this post carries the full profile.

The journal and the wider children's rights literature

No field is served by one journal alone, and this one's position is best understood against its neighbours. General human rights journals publish children's rights articles occasionally, usually when a case or a reform has wider constitutional significance. Child and family law journals approach many of the same facts — custody, care, adoption, juvenile justice — from within one national legal system. Childhood studies journals approach them from sociology and anthropology, sometimes with limited interest in doctrine. The International Journal of Children's Rights is the place where those three conversations are required to meet: a doctrinal claim must survive contact with evidence about children's lives, an empirical finding must be located inside the Convention's legal framework, and a national case study must explain itself to readers from other legal families. That enforced meeting is the journal's editorial achievement, and it is why its special issues and interviews — including its published conversation with the heads of the African and United Nations children's rights committees — are read as field documents, not only as articles.

The journal's longevity also gives it a documentary value that newer titles cannot offer. A researcher can follow, within one periodical, the whole arc of the modern field: the first attempts to say what the Convention required of states in the 1990s; the long argument over whether children's rights were really rights at all, or welfare in legal dress; the participatory turn, in which children's own accounts of courts, care and schooling began to change the questions adults asked; the incorporation debates, as state after state decided whether the Convention would be directly usable in its courts; and the present period, in which digital life, climate pressure, migration and armed conflict test a treaty drafted for an earlier world. Later authors in the journal argue with earlier ones by name, and the footnotes of a current article routinely reach back across the journal's own three decades. For a doctoral student, working through that internal conversation is the fastest reliable way to learn what the field has already settled, what it has merely repeated, and where a genuinely new contribution could still be made.

A practical note on access completes the picture. Brill is a subscription publisher, and much of the journal is read through university and institutional libraries, while individual articles — including some major pieces — appear open access under Creative Commons licences, as the incorporation article in volume 28 did. A reader without institutional access should therefore check the individual article before assuming a paywall: search the DOI, look for the open access version the publisher or the author has posted, and use interlibrary services for the remainder. What should not be done is to rely on summaries of this journal's articles in place of the articles themselves; in legal scholarship the qualifications are the content, and a summary that omits them misrepresents the author's position.

One more habit will serve any reader of this journal well: always note the date of the law being described. Children's rights scholarship is unusually perishable, because its subject is a living treaty system whose committee issues new general comments, whose states keep reforming their child law, and whose courts keep deciding cases that shift the meaning of familiar articles. The journal handles that perishability better than most sources, precisely because its volumes are dated, numbered and continuous — a claim can be placed in its year and checked against what the field has said since. Used that way, the journal is not only a source of answers but a clock for the field itself, showing which questions are new, which are returning in new dress, and which have been argued, thoroughly and in print, for thirty years.

Bottom line

The International Journal of Children's Rights is the founding specialist journal of the modern children's rights field: established in 1993 under Brill in Leiden, identified by ISSN 0927-5568 and 1571-8182, and organised around the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child — its interpretation, its incorporation into national law, the participation of children in decisions about their lives, and the protection systems that states build in its name. For legal scholars, practitioners and policy makers working on any question where a child is a rights holder rather than only a dependant, it is a first place to look, and its three decades of volumes are the field's memory.