Convention on the Rights of the Child and some aspects of civil law and family law

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to have a look at some institutions of civil law and family law in the light of the requirements of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of this Convention. The child’s incapacity or limited capacity to act, the child marriage and the child’s right to be heard shall be envisaged from a legal historical perspective with a special regard to the age-limits and the modifications of these age-limits on the field of civil law and family law. The subject of the historical overview is the concerned regulations of Hungary, namely the changes in the Hungarian legal rules and the regulations of the effective Hungarian Civil Code which entered into force in 2014. The paper would like to provide a guide for a travel from the end of the nineteenth century to today’s legal rules on the field of age-limits in connection with the above-mentioned institutions which designate the child’s legal position concerning some children’s rights. Some issues of the judiciary concerning the child’s right to be heard in family law proceedings will be mentioned as well to highlight a problem of the everyday legal life. The final aim of this historical travel is to discover whether the discussed legal rules being in force today meet the requirements of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and to compare the legal attitude behind the effective legal rules and the attitude of the child-focused thinking, which shall be also analysed.