The Best Interests of the Child in the Concluding Observations of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child: A Positive Obligation in Search of a Definition

The views of human rights treaty bodies are essential in understanding key treaty provisions. However, the interpretations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the monitoring body of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, are mostly scattered among concluding observations that the CRC issues in response to states' periodic reports. Through systematic analysis, this article shows how the CRC conceptualises the best interests of the child, an important yet indeterminate concept for the children's rights framework and human rights law in general, in these observations. The article argues that the CRC connects best interests to various recurring contexts. Most importantly, the CRC focuses on active measures through which states are supposed to implement the best interests of the child. These six cross-cutting themes-legislative measures, integration in practices, cooperation, awareness-raising and training, resources, and monitoring-correspond to the general measures of implementation that the CRC has previously identified, and they are used as a framework to analyse the concluding observations. The results demonstrate the importance of domestic structures in implementing human rights. They can also be interpreted as reflecting the CRC's understanding of best interests as a positive obligation.