How green are children’s rights institutions in the Visegrád countries?

Abstract

Environmental damages have already been clearly linked to human rights- and particularly children’s rights violations as climate change particularly affects the present (and future) generation of children, undermining the effective exercise of rights enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN CRC), including the right to life, survival, and development, health, an adequate standard of living, education, and freedom from violence.

With the almost universal ratification of the UN CRC, states have committed to the obligation to enforce children’s rights at all levels of society. In the possible best implementation of the UN CRC, independent human/children’s rights institutions (IH/CRIs) can play a vital role. However, many ICRIs still do not confront issues associated with environmental and climate change related to children’s rights. My main question was why these institutions are not (or are only barely) addressing these issues. In this paper, I focus on mapping the implementation of children's right to a healthy environment by analyzing the ICRIs in the Visegrád countries: Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia through descriptive and comparative techniques and a survey sent to dedicated institutions.