On the 13th of May 2024 at Maastricht University, I defended my PhD dissertation titled Do Our Children Have Rights? Children’s Rights in the Unrecognised State of Somaliland. Human rights are supposedly universal, applicable to everyone, everywhere and at every time.
However, children living in unrecognised states, also called de facto states, are often left out and are invisible to international human rights law. International human rights law is (recognised) state-centric and often looks at issues from the prism of state and non-state actors. Entities like Somaliland (and also Taiwan and Kosovo, among others) do not fit such dichotomy because they cannot be classified as non-state actors. They have fulfilled the objective criteria of statehood, but they do not have recognition at all, as in the case of Somaliland or are partially recognised (e.g. Kosovo and Taiwan).
The research examined the applicability of international human rights law from the perspective of being an unrecognised state and the national laws of Somaliland concerning children’s rights. My aim is to contribute to the legal discourse related to international human rights law from legal doctrinal methodology with the hope that international human rights law will become inclusive and truly universal.
The full copy of the dissertation can be found here.
You can watch below the PhD defence of Guleid:
