Global Childhood — an Essentially Uncontested Concept?

Abstract

On 1 March 2005, the US Supreme Court ruled by a vote of 5-4 that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution of the United States forbid the execution of offenders who had not yet reached the age of 18 when committing their crime. With the United States being one of the two countries that have, until today, not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, this Supreme Court decision is of great significance. There are many who contend that the practice of sentencing juveniles to death has been one of the main obstacles to US ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989, which provides in its Article 37 (a) that ‘neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without possibility of release shall be imposed for offences committed by persons below 18 years of age’.¹ The Supreme Court decision might facilitate US ratification of the CRC, which would move this document to almost universal acceptance (with only Somalia not having ratified). When the Supreme Court made its decision, Justice Kennedy, speaking for the majority of the judges, stated ‘[r]etribution is not proportional if the law’s most severe penalty is imposed on one whose culpability or blameworthiness is diminished, to a substantial degree, by reason of youth and immaturity’.²