The Significance of a Child's Right to Identity in Interpreting the Right to Maturation and Development

This article assesses a child’s right to identity as a fundamental factor of the child’s right to maturation and development. In the discipline of constitutional law, the semantic content of a child’s right to maturation and development has hardly been elucidated, and little has been clarified about this right despite the long recognition of this right. However, it is reasonable to think that Article 13 of the Constitution, which stipulates that the dignity of individuals requires the state to guarantee the right to maturation and development to children and to enable them to realize their “human nature” supposed under constitutional law; that is to say a person can pursue a conception of the good and open up a new path of his/her life autonomously, and simultaneously can socially cooperate with others who may have different conceptions of the good from his/her own. This article positions the child’s right to maturation and development as a constitutional right derived from Article 13 of the Constitution, and interprets the child’s right to identity, which is supposed to preserve the child’s identity as an “authentic-self” through state protection of ties meaningful to him/her, as a fundamental factor of the above right, while referring to various relevant arguments or cases