Legal Protection of Children’s Rights A Comparative Study of Iraqi and Iranian Law

This study examines the rights of children in iraqi and iranian law and due to the efforts of the iraqi and iranian legislators to protect the rights of children, on the one hand, they have mentioned many legal texts related to children’s rights and on the other hand, with international treaties and conventions and agreed on human rights and children’s rights. In fact, children are the main pillar of survival and guarantee of the future. Therefore, our research focuses on defining the issue in terms of importance, review and purpose and includes explaining various sources that deal with children’s rights because according to differences in defining the concept of child, international law and internal disagreements with jurisprudential opinions and the laws of individual ijtihad in this regard, and each to consider the basic concept of “children’s rights” is considered a specific age stage for a child and then enter into its nature. International and regional conventions on the rights of the child are considered to be the general law of the rights of the child, and the need to respect the fundamental rights enshrined in the 1989 convention on the rights of the child is seen as the minimum level of protection that all countries must provide for all their children. The islamic republic of iran is one of the countries that has enacted new laws to protect children, and despite the fact that many studies in the form of books, dissertations and articles about iranian children are always published, but studies in the field of children and adolescents have no higher role than the quran doctrines that are able to form new ideas and have an independent islamic culture. The treatise on the rights of imam zina al-abidin (as) considers rights for the child that have not yet been achieved by contemporary societies. The generalities and details of the content of the international convention on the rights of the child are nothing more than the rights of the child of imam zina al-abedin, which were written fourteen centuries ago. Imam zina al-abedin’s treatise, in addition to observing the set of religious and moral values, is distinguished from the rights of the contemporary child by the idea that the child is a trust to parents, relatives and society. The subject of our research is divided into two parts. In the first part, with the aim of determining the nature of the child and clarifying the scope of the child’s rights, we have dealt with crimes related to marital status before the birth of the child, in which we focus on the right to blood, lineage, nutrition and then natural breastfeeding. We have examined registration, care, financing, education, etc., then the concept and nature of child rights (from the perspective of social protection) and the resulting rights, which are guardianship, alimony and health. After introducing each of these rights, we can determine the social nature of rights, and in order to be at the heart of the issue, the present study proposes to provide a definition of the nature of child rights and social and family education to determine the structure of these rights. In this regard, the need to study the legal protection of children’s rights to clarify those rights and recognize the extent of access to it in the laws of iran and iraq is raised. We have used the method of inductive analytical research and the comparative method between the laws of iran and iraq and have divided the dissertation into three chapters; the first chapter deals with the concepts and generalities and the second chapter deals with the protection of prenatal child rights in iranian and iraqi law. In the third chapter, we support the laws of iraq and iran on the rights of the child after birth. The results we have obtained from our studies and some concluding suggestions of this research are what we hope will be considered by the relevant authorities.