INTRODUCTION

The main objective of this study is to provide all those involved in the promotion and defence of the rights of the child with arguments and instruments that will help them understand the value and importance of the processes aimed at bringing norms and policies at the national level into line with the spirit and terms of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The approach adopted in this chapter is to synthesize specific examples, obtained through direct and indirect experience, coupled with the discussion and conceptual analysis of a number of key problems. This will help readers understand the different kinds of impediments and main obstacles that lie in the path of these reform processes. Particular effort is made to explain the strategic and inevitable characteristics required of legal reform processes in order to achieve extensive and sustainable development of social policies in favour of children. Avoiding the regulatory fallacy whereby legal reform is conceived as an end in itself, the aim of this chapter is to show the complex nature of such types of reform, as an essential condition yet one that is, at the same time, insufficient for the realization of children's rights because the latter goes beyond the horizon of programmes of limited scope and leads to the formulation of policies for all children.