Can a Child Sue a State? A socio-anthropological inquiry into prerequisites of children’s access to international justice

Can a child sue a state? Or, if rephrased in precise legal terms, do children have the legal capacity to take action against states in case of unlawful or arbitrary treatment? How and through which avenues is this access to justice granted or achieved, especially in the case of the most disadvantaged groups? In this regard, surprisingly little empirical evidence has been collected across disciplines. In recent years, legal scholars have acknowledged that access to justice (as a right and as a procedural concept) with a specific focus on children still lacks “careful consideration, conceptualisation and contextualisation in academic research and writing" (Liefaard, 2019) This research, located at the intersection of legal anthropology and socio-legal (“law and society") studies, is intended to fill-in this significant gap.A direction for further investigation may come from the sociological literature, in which the operational definition of access to justice holds that access to justice means the availability/accessibility of legal professionals in a given social context. This form of mobilization of legal professionals, which consists of pro-active litigation on behalf of children has so far been under-theorized both in sociological and in legal literature. A pressing venue of research is therefore to bring in sharp scientific focus on a child-specific issue: the indispensability of adult legal actors as conduits to children’s access to justice-and their strategies to fill-in the vacuum between aspirational human rights mandates and domestic and international barriers to effective justice-making. In this sense, the author considers the two recent decisions by the EHRC (Khan v. France, H.A. v. Greece) as indicative of processes of vast mobilization of legal professionals on behalf of children migrants, processes that have not yet entered the scope of contemporary research.Therefore, this project seeks to develop an analytical framework for studying the legal battles around children-related issues, as they occur in different social arenas, tracing the full encounter of the child with the law: at the borders and on the sea shores (Calais, Lesbos), in migration camps, in immigration centers, in national immigration courts (in Greece and France) and eventually at the European Human Rights Court (in Strasbourg), and at the committee of the Rights of the Child (in Geneva). Its novelty consists in providing a multidimensional and realistic model of the complex, sometimes contradictory process, relying on a multiplicity of factors and agents, process that in legal language is commonly described as “children’s access to justice". By laying the focus on social and legal interactions among the young migrants and their lawyers, and analyzing the emergence and development of mutually-significant alliances between migrant children and legal professionals, the aim is to come to a deeper understanding of the ways both children and their lawyers conceptualize processes of justice-making and make sense of shifting social and legal terrains around the competing conceptions of childhood and adulthood.