Why Care? Children's Rights and Child Poverty

Over the past decade, EU and national policy-makers alike have paid more attention to childhood poverty and childrens rights. Whether this has led to better policies, and whether these policies have in turn resulted in less childhood poverty and more human dignity, remains debatable. A better understanding of both child poverty and childrens rights could help. This book introduces several approaches in the field of child poverty and childrens rights studies, and identifies intersections between different theoretical approaches from both domains. This is a fruitful exercise for the academic disciplines involved, for policy-makers and for anyone taking an interest in these challenging subjects. Childrens rights may provide some common ground for the different perspectives on the causes of poverty. They also introduce specific process requirements, in particular the participation of the poor. At the same time, childrens rights may gain from an encounter with child poverty studies, no

Wouter Vandenhole is an internationally recognized expert in transnational human rights obligations and in human rights and development. He has been invited as guest lecturer to universities all over the world. He serves on the editorial board of several international journals, among which the Journal of Human Rights Practice and Human Rights and International Legal Discourse. He has taken up management functions in European research and teaching networks: he was the chair of the Research Networking Programme, Beyond Territoriality: Globalization and Transnational Human Rights Obligations (GLOTHRO), funded by the European Science Foundation (2010-2014); he was the vice-chair of the COST Action The Role of the EU in UN Human Rights Reform (2009-2013); and is a member of the executive committee of the Children’s Rights Education Academic Network, funded by the Life Long Learning Programme of the European Commission (2012-2015). He is the lead convenor of an international summer course on Human Rights for Development (hr4dev.be). Wouter Vandenhole holds the chair in human rights and the UNICEF chair in children’s rights at the faculty of law of the University of Antwerp since 2007. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Tilburg University (Veni Grant) from 2005 to 2007, and a senior teaching assistant at the European Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation in 2002-2003. From 1995 to 2005, he was a researcher at the University of Leuven. BA in Philosophy, University of Leuven (Belgium), LL.B., LL.M. University of Leuven (Belgium), LL.M. in Law in Development, University of Warwick (UK); Ph.D. University of Leuven (Belgium).