PhD Conferral Mrs. Marieke J. Hopman, MA

Keywords: children's rights violations, laws, children's right to education, home education

“Looking at Law Through Children’s Eyes”

This dissertation developed a new way of investigating children’s rights violations. The research suggests that if we want to understand why children's rights are being violated, no matter the country, we must look at the situation through the eyes of the children themselves. Which laws actually apply to them? In addition to the laws of the state - which children may not even know existed - there may also be laws closer to home, for example, regarding the parents or school. This hypothesis has been tested in three different case studies:

1) Children’s right to education in the Netherlands, with a focus on homeschoolers, home education and Roma
2) Children's right to education in the Central-African Republic
3) Children’s right to nationality in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus

This is the first PhD research project in the Netherlands that has been funded on the basis of crowdfunding.