The right of the child to be heard in family law proceedings has progressively evolved from a discretionary judicial practice into a fundamental procedural guarantee. While international instruments—particularly the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and its General Comment No. 12—provide a shared normative framework, domestic legal systems continue to diverge significantly in the modalities, scope, and legal consequences of child participation. This article offers a comparative analysis of selected European jurisdictions—Italy, Germany, France, and England and Wales—and the United States, examining how the child's voice is incorporated in custody and parental responsibility disputes. Drawing on doctrinal analysis, comparative methodology, and leading case law of the European Court of Human Rights and U.S. courts, the article identifies five structural tensions that cut across legal traditions: between autonomy and protection, standardization and discretion, voice and impact, procedural transparency and child protection, and direct versus mediated participation. The paper argues that effective listening requires not only formal recognition but also a coherent procedural architecture—combining mandatory hearing obligations, specialized professional training, standardized protocols, and reasoned judicial engagement—capable of transforming participation from a symbolic gesture into a genuine condition of procedural legitimacy.
Rosa Di Caprio (Fri,) studied this question.