THE PRINCIPLE OF NON–ARBITRARY DISCRIMINATION AGAINST CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS: FROM THE CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD TO THE LAW ON GUARANTEES AND COMPREHENSIVE PROTECTION OF THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

Abstract

The simple consideration of the condition of being a child or adolescent as one of the causes of structural discrimination that have historically affected people has led the legislator to gradually take into consideration–to make visible–age as one of the prohibited–or suspicious–categories susceptible to being expressly enumerated in the non–discrimination clauses established in the different legal systems. In addition to the above, we must add the problems arising from situations of intersectional discrimination, that is, when the status of being a minor is superimposed on another or other structural conditions of vulnerability–such as sex, gender, nationality, immigration status, disability or poverty–, generating, in such a case, a more complex form of exclusion that has its own particularities. In this context, both the Convention on the Rights of the Child, at the international level, and the Law on Guarantees and Comprehensive Protection of the Rights of Children and Adolescents, at the domestic level, state, among their guiding principles, a general non–discrimination clause designed to provide an effective response to such eventualities. In this sense, the main objective of this article is to investigate the response offered by such norms to the phenomenon of so–called intersectional discrimination against children and adolescents. As a result, we find that intersectionality emerges as a theoretical framework that illustrates how social identity, constituted by different structural elements, can overlap with the category of children and adolescents, generating new and particularly critical situations of vulnerability.