Although children are currently recognised as full holders of human rights within both national and international legal systems, the effective implementation of children’s rights in practice continues to face significant challenges. Therefore, the primary aim of the monograph “Children’s Rights in Central and Eastern Europe: Comparative Analysis with a Spotlight on Lithuania”, prepared by the LCSS Law Institute, is to contribute to the improvement of child protection systems by providing evidence-based insights and recommendations.

In this book, researchers from the three Baltic States, Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, and Romania examine various aspects of children’s rights as enshrined in constitutional, civil, administrative, labour, and criminal law across the Central and Eastern European region. The volume also addresses emerging twenty-first-century issues, including inclusive education for children with disabilities, the rights of children belonging to national minorities, and children’s rights to privacy and personal data protection, among others. The comparative analysis of the Lithuanian legal system and those of other countries applied in this monograph is particularly valuable for policymakers, practitioners, and the academic community, as it enables the identification of good practices and learning from the experiences of different countries. At the same time, the publication fills an important gap in the academic literature by focusing on Central and Eastern Europe, a region that has often been underrepresented and overlooked in global discussions on children’s rights.

The book, published in open access by the internationally recognized publisher Springer Nature, will be available to interested audiences worldwide without any financial obligations.

The open-access publication of this collective monograph was supported by the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT) through funding allocated to the LCSS Law Institute project “An Interdisciplinary Dialogue Among International Researchers on Children’s Rights: Publishing a Collective Monograph with a Foreign Publisher” (VAIKAI), Contract No. S-LISs-25-3.

The open-access book is available in English here.