Refugee Status and Resettlement 4. Their developmental needs, their dependency, and their lower legal and social status make this special attention essential. This Section will discuss how resettlement criteria should be applied to minors. In other words, it applies to all minors. The terminology of the CRC causes confusion, however.
Confusion is caused because the word child in the treaty is being used in an unusual way.
According to the dictionary, a child is a person who has not yet reached puberty or sexual maturity, and in common usage it is not applied to anyone over 14 or 15 years. A person who is no longer a child but not yet an adult is an adolescent. It is helpful to remember that article 1 of the CRC is defining a word in a legal text, and is not defining real life human beings. In lawyers' jargon, the term child is a legal fiction , that is, an artificial definition in a legal text. The terms unaccompanied minor or separated minor should be distinguished from orphan .