The Human Rights of Children in an Age of Mobility

Abstract

This Essay reviews Jacqueline Bhabha, Child Migration & Human Rights in a Global Age (Princeton, 2014), ISBN 978-0-6911-4360-6, 374 pages. Jacqueline Bhabha offers a rich and thought-provoking analysis of child migration flows, presenting historical and current cases of child migration, applicable legal frameworks, fundamental principles of child human rights, and procedural or administrative instruments that affect child migrations. She discusses movement for family reunification purposes, as refugees seeking sanctuary, as victims of exploitation such as human trafficking and recruitment as child soldiers, and autonomous migration in search of a better live. This Essay identifies and summarizes the key themes of and questions raised by Bhabha, and offers critiques of the volume’s failure to address the structural causes of state inhospitality or to engage with the threat that states perceive from the unsanctioned and unregulated flow of mobile humanity.