New Publication: Child/Youth Leadership and Climate Cases — Postpaternalism in the Courts?

11 Aug 2026

A new article by PI Prof. Aoife Daly and Lucy Walsh, former Research Assistant on the Youth Climate Justice project, has been published in the Oñati Socio-Legal Series.

Children and young people are now bringing climate cases before courts and human rights bodies across every region of the world. Much of the commentary on this phenomenon has focused on what these cases achieve in legal terms: which rights are recognised, which obligations are affirmed, which remedies are granted. A new article by Prof. Aoife Daly and Lucy Walsh, former Research Assistant on the Youth Climate Justice project, asks a different question — what these cases tell us about children and young people themselves as leaders, and whether courts are equipped to see them that way.

The article, published open access in the Oñati Socio-Legal Series, examines child and youth leadership within climate litigation and argues that it forms part of postpaternalism: children and young people engaging in grassroots action on a global scale, for the first time, rather than well-meaning adults "giving" them their rights. Postpaternalism is a central concept running through the project's work, and here it is put to work on the legal record itself.

Drawing on an analysis of 15 climate cases involving children and youth, the authors find that leadership is not incidental to these cases but inherent in the taking of them — and above all in the way children assert their constitutional and human rights as legal actors in their own right. Applications refer significantly to the leadership children exercise in their own communities and countries, and children frame their claims on behalf of all children and young people, or on behalf of humanity more broadly. Leadership, in other words, is something children define and practise on their own terms, not a quality conferred on them by adult institutions. 

The picture changes when the authors turn to what courts say in return: references to children's leadership in judgments and case outcomes are limited. That asymmetry is the article's sharpest finding. Children arrive in these proceedings as rights-makers, and are largely written back out of the record as claimants like any other — a gap that matters for how child-friendly justice systems are designed, and for whose expertise counts in climate decision-making.

The authors conclude that the involvement of children and youth in these cases is crucial both for human rights and for the climate.

Read the full article here