COMPLETION REPORT
Yen-Chi Liu
Fu Jen Catholic University
In this research, I compare pathways to fulfilling children’s rights and especially implementing the United
Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (hereafter refer to as the CRC) both in Taiwan and Japan.
In 1989, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the CRC, whose preamble emphasizes “the need toextend particular care to the child” and that “childhood is entitled to special care and assistance.” The enforcementof the CRC gave the Taiwanese government as well as child protectionists impetus to reexamine the old ChildWelfare Act. In 1991, the Legislative Yuan (the Congress) embarked on revising the 1973 Child Welfare Act.
Elements of foreign legislation and the CRC were incorporated into the new 1993 Child Welfare Act. Although nota state party to the CRC, Taiwan domesticated some CRC provisions (Arts. 3, 8, 18) in the Act. A few years after
the passage of the 1993 Child Welfare Act, child protectionists began to advocate that the Child Welfare Act and theJuvenile Welfare Act be incorporated into each other. In 2011, the Act was renamed as “The Protection of Childrenand Youths Welfare and Rights Act,” and children’s autonomy was emphasized in multiple articles. In 2014,
Legislative Yuan passed the “Implementation Act of the Convention on the Rights of the Child” to officially makethe CRC a domestic law. The Implementation Act marked a great shift of child protection from simply selectivelyadopting some CRC principles in legislation to formally requiring all governmental authorities to take all provisionsof the CRC into consideration when enacting policies that would affect children’s benefits. Two trends can be foundin children’s rights in Taiwan: (1) in the 1990s and mid-2000s, children’s vulnerability was underscored. Therefore,
policies stressing welfare, care and protection were written in the law. (2) In the 2010s, children’s agency has beenhighlighted, as a result of legal education prevailing on high school campuses and important social movements
organized by college students.
In Japan, as a signatory country of CRC since 1994, child protection policies have been promoted by local
governments since mid-1990s because of devolution. Owing to ageing issues and appalling news of child abuse
incidents, policies have been proposed and implemented. Since the 2000s, child poverty and discrimination againstchildren have been worsening according to academic literature as well as the state reports under the requirement ofArticle 44, Paragraph 1 of the CRC. In order to deal with these social problems, the enactment of the “Act on
Promotion of Development and Support for Children and Young People,” which functions as Taiwan’s “Protectionof Children and Youths Welfare and Rights Act,” helps to integrate policies of children. Juvenile justice, bullyingand truancy are also stressed in the child-protection agenda.
Compared to Taiwan, Japan has focused on covering a wide range of areas of child protection but put moreemphases on poverty and child abuse, which means that children’s vulnerability and dependency are muchconsidered. However, in Taiwan, children’s autonomy and agency gain more public attention. Additionally, Japanrelies more on local governments owing to the power of self-government; while in Taiwan, the central government
controls from dimensions of policies to implementation details, which means that policies for children could beaffected more owing to political turmoil.

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Publication of the Results of Research Project:
Verbal Presentation (Date, Venue, Name of Conference, Title of Presentation, Presenter, etc.)
Date: 24th- 25th of July, 2021
Conference: 2021 Asia Legal Conference (organized by Chines University Hong Kong Law School and the
University of Law – Hue University)
Venue: University of Law – Hue University, Vietnam (due to the pandemic, the conference will be virtual)
Title of Presentation: The Making of Juvenile Justice in Postwar Taiwan: Looking for Legacies of Republican
China’s Criminal Policies (tracing how the Japanese genealogy of Juvenile policies travelled from China to Taiwan
after WWII, where the island’s original ones, implemented by the Japanese colonial government, were suspended by
the Nationalist Government.)
Presenter: Yen-Chi Liu

Thesis (Name of Journal and its Date, Title and Author of Thesis, etc.)
In progress.

Book (Publisher and Date of the Book, Title and Author of the Book, etc.)-2-