1. INTRODUCTION

The very concept of children’s rights rests upon a differentiation of childhood and adulthood that is ordinarily marked, in law, by chronological age. This brightline approach, which is firmly entrenched in international children’s rights law, provides legal certainty, and protects the rights of children in most contexts until they reach the age of 18. Yet strict age-based boundaries belie the complexity of childhood experience, and reflect outdated and arbitrary presumptions of maturity and need. Further, such boundaries fail to respond to the theoretical and empirical insights of the sociology of childhood, child development, developmental neuroscience, and research into vulnerability and intersectional disadvantage. Such insights inform us that the markers differentiating adulthood and childhood are contestable, individual and fluctuating. Efforts to blur the boundaries between adulthood and childhood have largely focused on extending (so-called) ‘adult rights’ – those associated with capacity for autonomous decision-making – to children. Attempts to achieve the converse (that is, extending children’s rights protections to young adults), however, have been far more limited, with the age of 18 typically representing a ‘cliffedge’ of protection and entitlement.

The automatic withdrawal of children’s rights protections at 18 can bring devastating and long-lasting consequences for young adults. The resulting injustices are particularly stark where legal decisions are made for an adult that relate to events or circumstances that occurred when they were a child. In this contribution, we argue that upper age thresholds can significantly undermine the value of children’s rights, particularly if the vulnerabilities they seek to address either prevail or are compounded, once the child reaches adulthood. We illustrate the injustices this can generate by reference to an issue considered by John Eekelaar in some of his most recent work: that of non-citizen children who commit criminal offences.

The focus on this group is particularly timely. The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 introduces new, tougher criminal penalties for those who enter the UK illegally, and to facilitate the early removal and deportation 6 of foreign national offenders (FNOs). In the year ending December 2021, 2,732 FNOs were deported; in 2019 (pre-Covid), the figure was 5,205.