Children’s rights to asylum have emerged as an urgent political challenge. This article uses a number of cases discussed in Sweden’s largest morning paper to analyse claims of asylum-seeking children and how these claims challenge the normative limits of contemporary asylum, concerning what and who ought to be recognized by law. Even though the universality of the child constitutes a running theme, the arguments and the conception of children underpinning the claims are diverse. The article suggests that the claiming of rights as a socio-political practice could be a vital analytical approach to studying children’s rights and offers a much needed alternative to the dominant mainstreaming paradigm.

The prospect of large populations of children migrating across national borders raises urgent political and ethical questions about childrens rights to asylum. In recent years, there has been an increase in scholarly interest in migrating children and childrens rights, but this interest has thus far been scant in political theory. The present article uses the Capability Approach to discuss childrens rights to asylum and to examine the prospects and limitations of the approach in this context. It underlines that, despite a global consensus on the rights of the child, the political and ethical challenges to childrens rights to asylum cannot be reduced to a question of the implementation of universal rights or capabilities of children a matter of technicalities or mainstreaming of legislation. Instead, the question of childrens rights to asylum is a highly political and ethical matter, characterized by ambivalent conceptualizations of children and conflicting interests that continue to pose a considerable challenge to the organisation of the international political and legal system. The Capability Approach has the potential to fill a theoretical gap with regard to childrens interests and the setting of threshold levels, although it continues to wrestle with questions of how to confront the asylum-seeking child as a political subject within well-functioning democracies and how to determine a specific list of capabilities and corresponding duties in deliberation between the right to self-determination of nation states and universal entitlements of children.

Children’s rights to asylum have led to political controversies in a number of countries in recent years. This article focuses on the translation of nearly universally recognised children’s rights principles into a domestic practice of immigration control, and explores how legal norms regarding children’s rights to asylum have developed in the Swedish Migration Court of Appeal 2006–2013. Court decisions are analysed with a focus on the meanings given to the best interests of the child, how this is given weight against state interests of immigration control, and how children’s interests are given normative force. It is only in a small minority of cases in which the Best Interests Principle (BIP) in fact does have a decisive normative force in granting residence permits and the meanings and use of children’s interests in court argument makes evident that the BIP enables both the granting and denial of residence permits. The BIP is doing normative work in double directions.