INTRODUCTION

As part of a larger project, entitled “From formal rights to real rights” at the Institute of Women's Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo, the subproject “Cultural considerations – in the best interests of the child?” analysed Norwegian decisions on taking minority children into care. The research question was how the “cultural background of the child” had been used as an argument in such decisions.

More specifically, the questions were, first, in what ways the cultural background of the child had been used in the assessment of the basic requirements for taking a child into care, and second, how it had been taken into account in the best interests determination which has to be undertaken once the requirements are considered to be fulfilled. The third issue that emerged from looking into the cases was the consideration of culture in deciding where the child should be placed, that is, in what kind of a foster home.

In this chapter, a “minority child” is understood as a child with an ethnicity and cultural background other than Norwegian, and who may have a different language and/or religion (that is, not belonging to Norway's majority church, the Church of Norway). The term “cultural background” is used as the short form of “ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic background”, as in Article 20(3) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Taking as a starting point the legal rules and their interpretation through the use of authoritative legal sources, not least by the Supreme Court of Norway, the project examined decisions from the county boards and the courts of first and second instance to see how the law was applied in practice. The county board is the competent body to decide that a child is to be taken into public care, whether or not with the consent of the parents or the child. It is an administrative body; however, it resembles a court in its independence and procedural safeguards to the extent that it is considered as a “court”, e.g. under the European Convention of Human Rights. Its decisions may be brought before the court of first instance, the County Court, whose decisions may in turn be appealed to the Court of Appeal.